By now, most people are using Google (search from this site using Google). It's great, but doesn't always find what you're looking for.

Here's some additional tools:

MSN uses a different database from Google, so it's a good one to use.

Search the Web for:

Use Advanced Search

Metacrawler, like other meta search engines, searches several major search engines quickly and compiles the results and displays them for you.

Here are some innovative search tools you might not have tried:

When a web site is down temporarily, you can use Google's cached version of the page. Once you've done your search, just click where it says "Cached". This copy will probably be a few days old.

Another option is to use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. They archive most sites on the web. Once you know the website's address, type it in the search box and you'll get dates for when they rescanned the page. If there's an asterisk, that means the page changed since the previous scan. You'll get just the text, not the images. You can often pull up archived copies of websites that are no longer online with this service.

Altavista's translation service can be helpful in translating a foreign website into your language.

Alexa Web Search - Top 500 web sites.

Yahooligans! Yahoo's web guide for kids.

J.D. Power Consumer Center rates internet services providers and telephone providers. Things can change in a matter of months in the telecom industry so a company that won the J. D. Power award last year isn't necessarily top notch now, so it's probably best to focus on the most recent ranking.

CNET is generally pretty helpful at testing and ranking tech stuff, like internet service providers, web hosting companies, software and hardware.

download.com has lots of free and trial software you can download. However, it's getting more and more common for free software to contain "spyware", which might report your web surfing habits to a company without your knowledge. Unfortunately, many download sites don't take the consumers side and tell you which software has spyware bundled into it. So if you're concerned about this, you'll need to do a little research to find out.

Spychecker - database of Spyware can help you figure out if software has spyware in it.