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There are many Web search engines available, and it's difficult to know which might be "best."  It's helpful to know a bit about how some of the major search engines work, and how they differ from each other.  Knowing more about them can help you choose the search engine(s) best suited to your needs.  Here are a just a few, well known search engines and directories, plus basic information on how they work and what kind of results they're likely to retrieve.

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Altavista	A large search engine with a number of advanced search features. Also useful for locating multimedia files, such as images, audio, and video files.  Altavista includes a directory, which categorizes websites according to broad categories.  Most intriguing is the Babel Fish translation feature that currently handles Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish translations to and from English, plus one-way translation from Russian to English.  You're guaranteed to find lots of results with Altavista, but will probably need to sift out ephemeral pages from the authoritative ones.  A good choice when you need to find that needle in a haystack.
AlltheWeb	Another very fast, award-winning, and popular search engine.  AlltheWeb is a good choice for finding all kinds of information and file types.  It currently offers excellent support for locating multimedia files such as images, music, and videos on the web.
Google	One of the largest and quickest search engines, and a good choice for research.  Works on the principle that important, authoritative pages will tend to be those that are heavily linked by other pages.  Useful for finding well-known and well-cited web pages, organized by most- to least-cited pages on your topic or search terms.  Other search services, such as Hotbot, have arranged with Google to use its software or portions of its index.  You'll get similar (but not necessarily identical) search results using such search engines, but only searching Google directly will produce comprehensive results from their service.
HotBot	This search engine now offers users the choice between four widely-known web crawlers - FAST, Google, Inktomi, and Teoma - to search the web for your terms.  Advanced search features differ according to which crawler is chosen.
Overture	Previously known as GoTo.com, this search engine is primarily focused on "pay for placement" results, meaning that companies or individuals pay money for their web pages to appear high in search result lists.  Overture describes this service as "commercial search," and uses the phrase "pay for performance" to describe this advertising emphasis.  Because of its pay for placement organization, this search engine is good for research on topics such as commercialism of the Internet, advertising, business, popular culture, and similar topics.  As of July 2003, Yahoo has acquired Overture, which could signal changes in store for Yahoo as well.
Yahoo	Easily one of the most recognizable and popular web directories, and as of 2002, also a web search engine.  The Directory portion of Yahoo relies on people to submit and to categorize sites.  The web search engine portion is powered by Google (and previously, by Inktomi).  Since late 2002, Yahoo's default search is the Web search feature, and Directory results must explicitly be chosen by the user.

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Some of the information on this page came from Search Engine Watch, one of the most interesting, current, and authoritative sources of information on the topics of how various search engines work, and how to use them to your best advantage.  Be sure to check out their Major Search Engines page for a listing of many more search engines than are listed here, and brief details on their history, strengths, and features.

Susan A. Vega García