HackCollege has published an helpful infographic that provides some useful "Googling" guidelines for students and researchers alike. The infographic is embedded below. (While many of the examples use Mac keyboard shortcuts, they are applicable to Windows users as well.)

Here's an example: if you want to do a search for an article about college test scores that you remember reading in the New York Times sometime around 2008 (or was it 2010?) and you want to be sure to leave out SAT data, you'd do the search like this:

site:nytimes.com ~college "test scores" -SAT 2008..2010

This limits the search to the NY Times site; using words that are related to "college"; with the phrase "test scores" but excluding "SAT"; and in the year range from 2008-2010. This is pretty handy stuff and definitely worth a glance if you regularly use google for searching.

Here's a direct link to the infographic.