Descriptions:

All the Web Live Search - Provides real-time search suggestions.
AltaVista - Large and powerful search engine. Offers Babel Fish, the Web's first Internet machine translation service that can translate words, phrases or entire Web sites to and from English.
Ask.com - Allows you to enter a question in plain English. Searches for matches in its own database and then runs query in five major search engines.
Google! - Ranks Web pages based on the number of other pages linking to it. (link popularity).
HotBot - Large index with many advanced searching capabilities. "Excellent for searching Web pages for people."
Intute - derived from 'Internet' and 'Tutorial'. Designed to provide the very best web resources for education and research, evaluated and selected by a network of subject specialists
Lycos - Also a smaller index, can also search for sounds and images.
MetaCrawler - Searches AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler, and Yahoo.
MSN Search - New Microsoft technology; including new search engine, index and crawler.
OAIster - Searches over 8,777,000 digital resources. These resources include: electronic books, online journals, audio files, images, movies, and reference texts.
WebCrawler - Searches Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search, Ask Jeeves, About, Looksmart at the same time.
Yahoo! - Largest subject collection on the Internet, search results are organized by category.

Search Tips:

Avoid common words:
Using a word that is very common like cars or jobs will retrieve an overwhelming list of results. Try to narrow your search terms or use a web site specific to your topic.
Example: For information on used cars, try "used car prices" or search http://edmunds.com [provides vehicle prices & reviews].

Use plus (+) symbol
To find material that must contain all of the search terms you enter, place the plus (+) symbol before each keyword in the search box.
Example: +vermont +travel
This search can also be entered as: vermont and travel

Exclude words you don't want
Use the minus (-) symbol before each keyword which should be excluded from your search results.
Example: +racing +bike -car [should eliminate pages about car racing]
Search also as: racing and bike not car.

Use OR to broaden your search
Example: car repair or automobile repair

Use quotes for phrases or proper names
When searching for an exact phrase or name, enclose it in quotation marks. Most search engines will then retrieve only pages where the words appear next to each other (exactly as you entered them) in the text.
Example: "Mia Hamm" or "golden gate bridge"

Read the Help sections
Most search services provide help tips. Read these sections for those sites which you use frequently.
Example: Yahoo! Help or Excite help