Whether your search yields 1 result for 5 million, you will have to do an initial evaluation to determine if the results are relevant to your research question.
Titles can help point you towards the main topic of an article. Scan the titles in the list of results and start with the most relevant sounding titles. Click on the result to get more information.
Even if you are only reading the article for class, it is important to pay attention to the date. How recent is the article? Depending on the topic, a recent article might be more relevant than older scholarship. For history, articles in the past 30 years would all be considered sufficiently recent.
An older article is not less important, but it could encourage you to ask further questions. Is this an especially influential article in its field? Has it been contested by subsequent scholars? Could the context in which it was written change the argument? Whatever the case, keeping these questions in mind as you read, can guide parts of your analysis.
If there is an abstract provided it will provide the main points of the article. These short paragraph should help you determine if you want to go further with an article or go back to the results list. It's ok, and can even be a good thing, if the article is about your topic and relevant to your research question but doesn't answer question exactly.
If the abstract seemed promising, start by reading the introduction of the article and then the conclusion. No need to dig into the body of it yet. The introduction and conclusion will help you determine if the article is likely to be useful to your research. Sometimes an article may be useful because it will provide specific evidence to support your research question. Other times, an article may be important to you for helping you to understand your topic better or to find more sources about your topic.