There are others to help you hone it in. Put mandatory things in quotes or with preceding +. There are also operators for inurl: and also filetype: (or ext:) that I have used often enough when looking for things that come in specific formats.
EDIT: I just read one of your other responses. Take a look at adding site: to the google searches. You could only do one site (reddit, hn, slashdot, etc) at a time, but it's still at least an easy way to get specific results.