Having a favourite search engine is an important thing - you need to understand the best ways to draw data out of it and you need to get to know its wiley ways.
Search engines
Google is your friend - learn to use Google and your days of fruit less searching are gone.
ZapMeta - a good, clean quick meta search engine (one that searches the search engines). A new entry with lots of promise.
Search Boss - a very efficient search engine that "cluster" your results in categories. The number of results is poor next to Google, but you gain the ability to browse more quickly into the results.
1Banana - Funk search engine that actually looks in other search engines and displays their results of your search in the page. It obiosuly can give more results than google ;P
Infonetware WebSearch is a demonstration of RealTerm technology applied to Internet search. It submits your query to a traditional Internet search engine and then sorts the results into topics. Now you can find what you're looking for in three mouse clicks.
Vivisimo is a cluster engine similar to Infonetware.
TouchGraph displays your search as a kind of node map, with related node linked to your query.
Directories
Dmoz - the Open Directory Project - this is the biggest and best and supplies its results to all sorts of other search engines (like the ones above)