We calculate the strange quark content of the nucleon, <N|ss|N> − <0|ss|0> using a novel method with the MILC lattice QCD gauge ensembles. The strangeness of the nucleon is related to the interaction cross section between dark matter and ordinary nuclear matter (e.g. in detectors) in many models. Previous results for this quantity suffered from uncontrolled systematic errors and/or large statistical uncertainties. The first result using our methods was the first modern calculation of the strangeness of the nucleon[76] with good control of systematic errors and reasonably small statistical errors, greatly reducing the uncertainty in dark matter detection cross sections. A refinement of this method allows for further reduction of statistical error. On the MILC Asqtad data, we obtain <N|ss|N> = 0.637(55)(stat)(74)(sys). The results obtained from this method are consistent with those obtained from other commonly-used methods applied to the MILC data. We also calculate the disconnected part of the pion-nucleon sigma term and the intrinsic charm of the nucleon using this method. The intrinsic charm has large statistical errors but is consistent with a perturbative calculation.