The only way you'll ever understand how to use a search engine effectively, is by first making a point of understanding how they work. In other words, you need to get a grip on the fundamental concepts of the various search engines before you'll be able to use them to your advantage. As you no doubt already know, search engines can be immensely confusing, but providing you're willing to delve a little deeper in order to get a basic understanding, you'll soon begin to realize just how they work.
First and foremost, you need to understand that search engines are used to catalog and index the millions of web sites and web pages which exist in cyberspace. Essentially, the search engines are state-of-the-art software programs which scan the Internet for content so that the content can then be categorized. When you type in a search and you press the enter key, you'll be presented with hundreds of thousands of relevant web pages which match your search criteria.
The first process of a search engine is for it to crawl the Internet, and in order for it to do this, it uses highly advanced software known as a crawler, spider, or bot. Essentially, these crawlers will crawl the web and follow links so that they can then scan available content, although it should be kept in mind that they are unable to scan anything which his password protected. Likewise, they cannot scan JavaScript and videos, in that they're designed to scan text only.
Once the spider has finished crawling the web, the information which was gathered is then indexed in a huge database which of course functions as an information bank. When users make use of the search function, the search engines will use this information bank in order to supply results. Within the framework of this index, several key words and keyword praises are utilized in order to relate web pages and web sites to specific search terms. Essentially, this is where your website gets ranked, and this is of course what determines where about your website will appear in search results.