A Search Primer (you don't have to always go with Google)

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While Google is the undisputed king of internet search, there are other options.  Try some from the list below the next time you do a search.  The bottom portion of this post contains links to search tips that will help you become a better searcher.

General Search Engines
 
All the Web, All the Time
One of the more recently developed Web indexing tools, this search engine indexes a very large database. It has separate search boxes for audio, FTP, and picture files. Advanced search options support domain filters, word filters, and allow searching in 25 different languages.

AltaVista
Alta Vista has a large database. It can perform searches in Spanish or English and translate words, phrases, and entire Web sites online into many languages using "Babelfish." Other improvements include phrase detection, spell check, Family Filter, and natural language capabilities.

Ask 
Ask is a search engine that is intended to be used with natural language questions. There are many extra features such as suggesting other terms that are along the same subject lines and local searching.

Bing
Bing is Microsoft's new search engine. On the left side of the screen, it has buttons for searching images, videos, shopping, news, travel, history and maps. There is a visual search option, as well.

Google
The most extensive search engine on the Web. Google search results are ranked based on site popularity rather than the common practice of paid positioning. Google also has specialized searches for certain operating systems, government documents, maps and scholarly articles. A single click translation service is available for most pages which will translate to the user's primary language. It also caches Web pages allowing an individual to view pages that are not currently available or that are on overburdened servers.

Hakia
Hakia is a semantic search engine that is focused on quality. Unique to Hakia, a single query brings a full set of results in all segments including Web, News, Blogs, Hakia Galleries, Credible Sources, Video, and Images. Among these segments, News, Blogs, Credible Sources, and Hakia Galleries are processed by Hakia's proprietary core semantic technology called QDEXing. Web, video, and images are processed by Hakia's SemanticRank technology using third party API feeds.

HotBot
HotBot allows many search options such as language, images, javascript, video, and MP3. Advanced search options allow searching by date, page depth, and domain name.

Mahalo
Mahalo is the one 'human-powered' search site in this list, employing a committee of editors to manually sift and vet thousands of pieces of content.  This means that you'll get fewer Mahalo hit results than you will get at Bing or Google. But it also means that most Mahalo results have a higher quality of content and relevance (as best as human editors can judge).
Mahalo also offers regular web searching in addition to asking questions.  Depending on which of the two search boxes you use at Mahalo, you will either get direct content topic hits or suggested answers to your question.

Topsy
The first index is based exclusively on Twitter statuses. When you search for something on Topsy, such as “free music,“ it finds snippets of conversations that match what you are looking for. Topsy results are the things people link to when they are talking about your search terms. Topsy ranks results based on how well they match your search terms and the influence of the people talking about them.

Twazzup
Twazzup is a Twitter search tool that provides almost all of what Twitter Search does itself, plus a list of the most influential tweeters on a topic, related photos, and keywords based on your search results to help you refine your search.

WebCrawler
WebCrawler is one of the oldest search engines and uses the Excite search software to search the Web. It is good for simple searching.

Yahoo
Yahoo is a collection of classified subject resources. If no matches are found in its own database, it searches the rest of the Web using Google. Options at the bottom of the screen link to searches in a particular country (Denmark, France, Mexico) or city (Los Angeles, New York City) which may be in the native language of that country.

Yippy
Yippy is a Deep Web engine that searches other search engines for you. Unlike the regular Web, which is indexed by robot spider programs, Deep Web pages are usually harder to locate by conventional search. That's where Yippy becomes very useful. If you are searching for obscure hobby interest blogs, obscure government information, tough-to-find obscure news, academic research and otherwise-obscure content, then Yippy is your tool.

Meta Search Engines

These search engines search multiple databases simultaneously. Both of these search engines remove the duplicates before presenting the search results.
Dogpile
Searches the major search engines simultaneously and allows the user to view the combined results or compare the results of the various engines side by side.

MetaCrawler
MetaCrawler simultaneously searches Lycos, Infoseek, WebCrawler, Excite, AltaVista, Thunderstone, DirectHit, LookSmart, and Yahoo. A brief annotation is provided with the search results.

Subject Guides

These subject guides are a starting point to specific information on the Web. Although they do provide search engines, those engines search only on the individual Web site (i.e., a search on the Librarians' Index to the Internet will only show sites listed on the Librarians' Index to the Internet).
Internet Public Library
Originally begun as a project of the University of Michigan School of Information and Library Studies, the Internet Public Library locates, evaluates, annotates and organizes the information resources of the Internet which would be of interest to patrons of a public library.

Scout Report Archives
The Internet Scout Project, located in the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is funded by the National Science Foundation. Resources can be searched by either a quick or complex search engine. Links can also be browsed by Library of Congress subject headings.

Web Searching Techniques

For more information on how search engines work, how to search, and tables and charts describing how these tools work, see the following articles:Beyond General World Wide Web Searching (From UC Berkeley)
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/FindInfo.html
Checklist of Internet Research Tips (from the University at Albany)
http://library.albany.edu/usered/iguides/iguides.html
Searching the Internet
http://www.sldirectory.com/search.html
Recommended Search Strategy: Search With Peripheral Vision
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Strategies.html