Improving your searching - and using good reference sites

Two great articles from Chris Sherman - the first is a good overview of reference websites, the second his New Year's search resolutions, including stopping using the Google toolbar (and instead using Firefox's excellent search plugins) and seeking multiple 'opinions' (search results). With the latter point he points out two great sites: Thumbshots's ranking tool allows you to compare sites' ranking across search engines (more about this here), and Jux2 runs a search simultaneously on three engines, showing common results.

PS: For a good overview of more specialised search engines, see this page.