Search is not limited to the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN). Look around the web, there are plenty of search engines to address your queries. And I have gathered the best that I have found...

Answers.com
The website is a one-stop search engine chamber with over 4 million topics. Uh-huh. That huge! The information includes excerpts from Wikipedia and Oxford University database and other reference publishers.

AfterVote
The site is a social 'metasearch' search engine that delivers results from the major web search engines. It shows how each site ranks in the search engines. As an added feature, the registered users can vote a website among the result and post comments which will appear in the search results.

AltSearchEngines
This is a blog about (as it name implies) alternative search engines. You can find sufficient information about the subject matter. All in all, there are more than a thousand. The blog may not have all the info about them but what is already there is essential.

KartOO
This is a metasearch engine that delivers the results not as the ubiquitous list but as a map or cloud. Each search result is represented by the URL and a thumbnail of the website. The results also show keywords and their relation to the sites.

Quintura
This site, which uses Yahoo's index, is based on a visual search engine technology. When you do a search using Quintura, the term you use appears at the center of a cloud. The related search terms narrow your queries.