The way I try to look at Breadth First Search is that you try the immediate possibilities first. Depth First you stick to one path until you hit a dead end and then try a different path. Say you are in a room with two doors that's inside another room with two door and you need to find an exit.
Breadth First you would first open the two doors that are in the immediate room and then the two doors in the surrounding room.
Depth First you would open the immediate door and then open the surrounding door. If that fails you would open the second immediate door and then the second surrounding door.
link to an animation:
http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~skiena/combinatorica/animations/search.html[
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