@Ricardothesnowman
The way I work it is I start with various words that can lead to knowing what sort of area you're looking for:
History
Scientist
Numbers
Death
King
theater (use US spelling!)
That sort of thing, which hopefully gives you an idea of the area. Obviously these words may be used in other groups too.
If those give me an idea, then I'll go into more specialised words. So if theatre comes up I might do:
Performances
west (for west end)
Hollywood
Oscar
academy
movie
stage
tv
If at this point I'm not getting closer then I might try and guess some general words that are often in:
who
which
where
some
come
Then look through and see if you've got a phrase that you can guess some more words in.
Other words that can be useful are things like:
century
war (then i and ii) both can give an idea of era
First
Second
Third are all ones that often lead to others.
law
theorem
solution are good on science/maths
Seasons sometimes are helpful-with "snow", as soon as I saw the hits for "winter" then "snow" was my next guess.
All the time I'm looking for something that can give me an idea. If it gives me a link to google (but not a phrase)
eg. I had
"The film XXXXX in the XXXX XXXX XXXX second or third in the world"
So I googled "film second or third in the word" and came up with 2-3 suggestions. (I try and avoid Wiki sites at that point) So I put them in and "Nigeria" had a huge number of hits so I knew it was to do with that, and then it was only a matter of time.
Other things to realise is the longer the blank grey rectangle, the longer the word, which again can give you clues. If the blank space is XXXXX it's unlikely to be "Volcaneclopecsupernueropticdertyuklnmugunhumbun".
And if I really get stuck then it's time to pick two or three phrases, put them in speech marks and google them and hope the Wiki site pops up. I try not to do that, but it has a couple of times come to that.