With Alta Vista learning about the boolean operators was important and helpful - it wasn't a very smart search engine, and giving it lots of hints what you want was a great help.

With Google Advanced search - some brilliant person designed this page:
http://www.google.ca/advanced_search
and it just keeps getting better - The tips on that page are great, and tell you how to do all this stuff with the normal search box.

Even better - Google keeps amazing records - what people ask first, then what people ask second - they are learning what we mean.

Tailoring search strings isn't about boolean operators anymore, and it is a moving target - it makes it hard to keep good resources up to date.