Skill in finding information is a skill honed through experience -- not by the use of a few tricks. Keep working on it and you'll find that you're getting better. (The harder you work the luckier you get!)
A search is (mostly) purposeful and structured (it's a "tree" to be exact). You need to have some sort of meta-view of your progress -- what have you tried and what might you try next.
Idly "surfing" the web is not a good way to find that the piece of data you're looking for. (Even while idly surfing, however, you may actually stumble across the information you need. Be sure to mark where you find it. Print at least the first page of what you find! [Set the preferences on your browser to that the URL is printed on the page when you print it!)
Observation: with search engines, the old rules often don't apply. (You can find, for example, 441 pages with Altavista that have the phrase "or go somewhere else" in them!) With older technologies the old rules probably still apply.
Any "scrap" of information you have that is related to what you're trying to find can be the ticket you need to find the additional information. This can be the name of an article, an author, a slogan, a phrase, keywords, etc. Be creative and thorough! Assume the information is there ... somewhere.
People are often a very good source for information. And there are lots of people potentially available on the Internet. Don't bother people -- especially people you don't know -- with questions before you've really tried to find the answer by through other means. If the information is available in a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) list or other obvious place, the person who receives your questions might not feel like helping you. If you do send e-mail, don't ask overly general questions: "Can you tell me how to start a community network?" (Buy my book!) Also don't suppose that they owe you anything! Remember that almost everybody is busy. Be sure to use please and thank you!
Having said that, you can often track down people's addresses fairly easily. Addresses of academics are among the easiest to find on the web site of their college of university. Here is a useful method I employ: If you know where a person gets their mail but not their actual address, send mail to postmaster@the-place-they-get-their-mail. This will usually go to the person who administers the mail system.
Altavista hints: Adding keywords to the search box yields more hits (as they're "or-ed" together). Putting a plus sign in front of all keywords "ands" them all together and you'll get fewer hits. If you're getting a bunch of hits from places you don't want, figure out a keyword for those places and add it to the search box -- with a minus sign in front of it. No site with that keyword will be returned! If you're looking for a phrase, put quotes around it in the search box. But beware -- it will only return hits with the phrase exactly as you entered it. Speaking of exact matches, you might try typing in keywords that are misspelled -- these will match pages that contain the keywords -- misspelled! I typed in "Doug Shuler" and found some pages that did refer to me -- even though they didn't know that my name is spelled "Schuler."
There is a 200 hit limit on Altavista. Even if it finds 11,223,908 pages, it will only show you the first two hundred URLs. If you want to see more you will have to resort to trickery! What I do is go into "advanced search" and search by dates. You can narrow the dates selectively and work your way through a big list.
Search engines let you experiment with keywords. Use "back" on your browser and modify the keywords you typed in last time. (Try that with your card catalog!)
Final note: Accumulating information is not a substitute for doing something with the information. Information in the hand is not the same as knowledge in the head. Your intellectual work is rarely finished when a piece of information is found!