I'm starting to avoid Google search alltogether but my best trick is including a really specific term that SEO would avoid because it might not be familiar to the reader. 90% of the time it will ignore the term but somewhere on the page there will be a page where it says it didnt match that term and if i want to search for matches that do include that keyword. That sometimes improves the results. Note: the query will look the same as quoting the term but in my experience doing that initially is simply ignores. All the old dorking/google-fu operators have been ignored by Google for some time now.
I also remember the past magically search days fondly..