Finding Official Sites

[Martin H]

I'm seeking advice on the best way to search for official sites. I'm finding that, in areas like travel, entertainment etc, the official sites of organisations are increasingly getting swamped by search engine results from other commercial sites. Any suggestions on good ways to cut to the real thing?
(Or must we return to working through human-selected directories?)

[seobook]

if a vertical is swamped then human edited content might be your best bet. some search engines also have advanced search pages which will allow you to limit your search to certain domain extensions if you are looking for educational or government type sites.

[USRecoveryInfo]

Suggest http://www.CityTown.info for official sites.

[USRecoveryInfo]

Thunderstone (http://search.thunderstone.com/texis/websearch/) search defaults to find the first page of a site. Most official sites have already obtained a .com .us .info .gov .net .org domain name. Spamming domain names is more expensive than producing a million pages per site. (for example hotels in Portland Oregon http://www.Spammer.com/Portland-Oregon-Hotels.htm) Other search engines can also be configured to search only for the main page of a site.

[Martin H]

I really appreciate the suggestions.
Limiting the domain name extensions can certainly help with government organisations (in some countries, anyway); the www.CityTown.info is good for the US and now Canada, but I have to search many different countries.
Thunderstone is new to me and looks a good bet -- on several test runs, it helped to sort the wheat from the chaff. And I'll experiment with configuring advanced search on other engines.
But I noticed that when companies are trying to attract traffic away from popular subjects, they are now not just offering pages aimed at doing this, but whole series of sites, each individually configured to top search listings.
I guess finding my way to the original sites is not going to get easier.