Keep it short (but not too short). When you can be both brief and specific, you're most likely to get what you want. For example, if you need a drawing of a male Muppet, a search for Bert turns up an overwhelming 314,000 results. A search for Bert Ernie gets you more than 6,500 pictures. And Bert Sesame Street weighs in with just over 1,700 images.

Experiment and be patient. The keywords Google associates with images are not always consistent. Thus, while it's generally a good idea to use very specific search terms, trying out variations can pay off, tooespecially when your attempt to be brief and specific, as suggested above, doesn't fly. For example, if vintage Cadillac convertible and 1953 El Dorado don't pan out, try 1953 Cadillac convertible or Cadillac El Dorado.

Try the Advanced Image Search feature. Google's Image Search has its own advanced search page, explained next, that's separate from the advanced page for regular Web searches. It can help you narrow down a search by file type, size, or coloration (black and white, grayscale, or full color).

Intitle can be a good way to hone searches because it looks for your keywords in Web page titles, which removes some of the guesswork for Google about what a page contains. Use it like this: intitle:"taj mahal".

Inurl works strangely in Google's Image Search, because when Google records the text on a Web page, it considers certain elementslike JPG extensionsas part of the URL. Thus, if you search the image bank for inurl:poker, Google might show you a picture from the URL www.dogsplayingcards.com/velvet.html because that page contains a picture called poker.jpg. That weirdness aside, inurl is like intitle in that it can whittle your results from tens of thousands of images down to a manageable number, like a few hundred.

Filetype is available as a choice in the Advanced Image Search, too, although you can use it to search only for the formats Google keeps track ofJPG, GIF, and PNG. The one trick with this operator is that you can specify filtetype:jpeg and filetype:jpg, which give you different results (the advanced page includes only an option for JPG). Use it like this: "poker chips" filetype:jpg.

Site is also part of the Advanced Image Search, and you can use it to limit your searches to particular sites or domains, which include segments of the Web, like .com and .net, and also countries, like .au (Australia) and .fr (France). The site syntax is especially handy when you want to restrict your results to images from Web sites from a certain country, like this: sitcom site:UK, which gives you pictures from British sites. And if you know that something you want to see is somewhere on one large site, use it like this: friends site:nbc.com.