• Study the search syntax reference page: http://doc.altavista.com/adv_SEARCH/syntax.html
• Use the search syntax. For example: how to search for information on endoscopic carpal tunnel surgery, but weed out some of the fluff? To search for pages which include the exact phrase endoscopic carpal tunnel but do not include the lay buzzwords repetitive or cumulative, enter the search terms with the following punctuation marks:

This little filtering improves relevance, and reduces the number of retrieved pages by a factor of 20, as shown in Table 4.