They're going to look at you with a blank face. Unlike a librarian, search engines don't have the ability to ask a few questions to focus the search. They also can't rely on judgment and past experience to rank web pages, in the way humans can. Intelligent agents are moving in this direction, but there's a long way to go. They follow a set of rules, with the main rules involving the location and frequency of keywords on a web page.
Search engines operate the same way.
Pages with keywords appearing in the title are assumed to be more relevant than others to the topic. Search engines will also check to see if the keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. They assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the beginning. Frequency is the other major factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page.