I think a lot of it has to do with understanding what's required information and what's not. Of course, that has to do with the skill of knowing that you need to provide just enough information, but not too much.

For example, a novice would search for something like "bob dylan lyrics creative process critical commentary". That suffers from having too much information. I'd probably start with "dylan lyrics commentary".

Another tip is knowing when to refine your parameters. If you're not seeing data approaching what you want in the first page, you need to rethink, like I might end up changing mine to "dylan -thomas lyrics commentary".

Also, thinking of new search phrases helps, and sometimes you'll see them in your initial search results, so paying attention to the snippets on the search page is quite relevant.

The likelihood of a user refining his results, I think, depends a lot on his ability to initiate a new search quickly. Many people seem content to just grab the mouse and keep clicking "next" in hopes that they find what they want because that's faster. Assuming that Firefox is already my focused window, I can do almost anything without leaving the keyboard, and part of that is configuration. First, I get rid of the search widget. It's a waste of space and time. I just create keyword bookmarks for places I search a lot. The one for Google is "g". So when I want to search on something, I can just press "<ctrl-l>g dylan lyrics<return>" or just "<ctrl-t>g dylan lyrics<return>" if I want it in a new tab. Also, configuring Firefox to tab only to form elements (accessibility.tabfocus=3) helps. On Google search pages, that means you can hit tab once and be in the search field, ready to edit.

On the other hand, I'm not sure most people will get this. I see every day people who have used Windows for ten years log in by moving their mouse, clicking in the username field, slowly moving to their keyboard, typing their username, moving to their mouse, moving the mouse, clicking in the password field, moving to their keyboard, typing their password, moving to the mouse, moving their mouse, clicking on the login button. It literally takes them like ten seconds just to get from Ctrl-Alt-Del to accepting their login info. My point being that some people are never going to acquire these skills, because they seem to have no idea how to acquire them on their own, and you can't force these types of skills into someone.