I use Google advanced almost exclusively, which gives me four basic categories:

"all of the words," "exact phrase," "at least one of the words," and "without the words."

Judicious placement of certain words in one or more of these gives me a series of entries. The key at that point is being able to scan hundreds of resulting entries rapidly looking for further key phrases or hints. I can check cached entries faster than the originals.

Repeating the process with different combinations of words narrows things down as you approach the answer from all sides at the same time. It's a form of parallel processing, but I couldn't nail it down tighter than that.