There are two things you need to do to look smarter. First, you can pick a subject-specific database. If you are finding a lot of unrelated articles, you might want to choose a database that deals in a specific subject to get sources that are all more closely related. The second thing you can do is create a more targeted search by understanding how searches work and adjusting what you are doing to get better results.
Searches are made of of three main ingredients: the things you type in, directions on how to put them together, and the rules about the things you are searching.
The things you type in are keywords. Those keywords are then combined according to the default directions (known as boolean operators) to be searched for within each item within the database. You can also provide a set of rules, or limiters, to tell the database what items to search.
The result list is the product of the ingredients you gave the database.
