Here’s a tip to make your online experience better.

Suppose your pet aardvark is sick and you want to know how to help it get better. So you type aardvark into a search engine on the Web…and you get 659,157 matches, including 1,450 cooking sites. You need to narrow your search to sites that are serious about aardvarks.

Enter title followed by a colon and then your search term. For example, try title:aardvark and you’ll get sites with the animal in their title — not necessarily in their URL, but in their official title, like "The Aardvark Page" or "The Care of Pet Aardvarks". Using the title prefix increases the likelihood that the sites found by a search engine really have to do with the subject.

This trick works for several search engines like Yahoo, HotBot, AltaVista and InfoSeek, though with Yahoo you can also just use the letter t with a colon, as in t:aardvark.