Surfing the net for software engineering notes

The World Wide Web is a wonderful place for research, but finding relevant information can sometimes be a problem. Most of the major search engines are great at finding key words or performing Boolean searches on key words, but there's no way to add meaning to the searches. For example, every month I pick a software engineering topic and search the web, looking for web sites containing research and reference material pertaining to the selected topic. Traditional Google searches yield tons of results, but very few of these hits actually wind up as featured sites in the column. When I run a search, instead of the reference and educational information I'm looking for, I get all sites relating to the selected topic, including advertising, jokes, blogs, eBay auctions and other content unsuitable for my purposes. I have no way of telling the search engines to show me all white papers or journal articles relating to "topic X".