Google's goal is to return high-quality, relevant search results. It uses text-matching techniques to find web pages that are relevant to search words entered. In addition, if there are two or more search terms, Google looks for pages where the terms appear in close proximity.
In order to assure that the highest quality sites get listed first, Google analyzes the "importance" of every web page it retrieves. Importance is based on the number of other pages with high importance that link to it.
Google seems to be achieving its purpose. Results of many of the searches that I've done have resulted in more sites with information truly useful for my query than I've found in other search engines.
Search Tips
The two menu choices that Google's search box includes relate to displaying results and not to search options. If you select Google Search, you will be presented with a list of results. Clicking I'm feeling lucky will take you directly to the first item on the list.
All search terms entered in the search box are required to appear in each item unless they are preceded by a minus sign (a minus sign excludes the term from your results). There is no way to prefer but not require a word to appear in each result. (For example, if you enter song tune melody, an item must include all three of these search terms in order to be retrieved as a result.)
You can use quotation marks to enclose a phrase.
Google does not search for common words like of, the, and a, - even if they occur as part of a phrase. (Instead, Google searches for the other terms in the phrase separated by the correct number of words.) You can force Google to search for these common words by inserting a plus sign in front of them, for example:
"statue +of liberty"
or
"+H +M +S Pinafore"
There has to be a space between words with plus signs.
After you perform a search, Google gives you the very useful choice of searching within the results you retrieve.
Results
Google's results are arranged by relevance, and their content differs in some important ways from those in other search engines. Some of the elements are the same, for example, title, url and size. However, instead of a description of each item resulting from a search, Google provides you with an excerpt of the web page, which includes one or more of your search terms.
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