B-Tree is a self-balancing search tree. In most of the other self-balancing search trees (like AVL and Red Black Trees), it is assumed that everything is in main memory. To understand use of B-Trees, we must think of huge amount of data that cannot fit in main memory. When the number of keys is high, the data is read from disk in the form of blocks. Disk access time is very high compared to main memory access time. The main idea of using B-Trees is to reduce the number of disk accesses. Most of the tree operations (search, insert, delete, max, min, ..etc ) require O(h) disk accesses where h is height of the tree. B-tree is a fat tree. Height of B-Trees is kept low by putting maximum possible keys in a B-Tree node. Generally, a B-Tree node size is kept equal to the disk block size. Since h is low for B-Tree, total disk accesses for most of the operations are reduced significantly compared to balanced Binary Search Trees like AVL Tree, Red Black Tree, ..etc.
Search is similar to search in Binary Search Tree. Let the key to be searched be k. We start from root and recursively traverse down. For every visited non-leaf node, if the node has key, we simply return the node. Otherwise we recur down to the appropriate child (the child which is just before the first greater key) of the node. If we reach a leaf node and don’t find k in the leaf node, we return NULL.
Traversal is also similar to Inorder traversal of Binary Tree. We start from the leftmost child, recursively print the leftmost child, then repeat the same process for remaining children and keys. In the end, recursively print the rightmost child.