Researching Tricky Queries; Tips on what to do when you can't find what you're looking for (Part 1)

Researching Tricky Queries;
Tips on what to do when you can't find what you're looking for

So you’ve started with what you know, maybe consulted an encyclopedia or a wiki for some background reading and with that you’ve come up with some keywords.  You’ve typed one into Google and…

Oops.  5 million hits.  That bites.  No way are you sorting through all of those. For one thing, some of them are obviously rubbish. And you can't cite RandomPaganGirl's Livejournal in your paper – she could be making it all up. Besides, there's just no way anyone could possibly have time to go through even 1/10th of those results. By the time you sort out the rubbish from the legitimate sources you can use, you won't have any time left to read those sources, take notes, and write a paper (and you'll probably have a migraine from staring at the computer screen for that long). So what do you do then?

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This series continues with Post #2 here.