This little collection of entertaining and informative web sites is offered to you on the condition that you don't blame me for any time you spend browsing the internet when you should be doing something more important. Deal? OK, read on ...
The symbols and commands used by the different search engines are not always the same, but many will accept "+" and "-" as a way of specifying that a word MUST be matched (+) or should be EXCLUDED (-). For example, a search for "+guitar +acoustic" will only return sites that contain BOTH keywords. If you just search for "guitar acoustic" you willprobably end up with a whole list of irrelevant sites that contain the keyword "acoustic" but have nothing to do withguitars. A search for "+guitar -bass" will return sites that contain the keyword "guitar" but do NOT contain the word "bass". For more info, check the FAQs for the search engine sites or take a look at this very useful site with tips on getting the most from search engines.
Meta search engines often give very good results. They send the same query to many of the best search engines, collect all the responses, and organise them foryou, giving you the best from all the main search engines(altavista, excite, yahoo etc). Meta search engines often give you more usefulresults than using a single search engine.
I have found Google is pretty much the best search engine. It's fast, it rarely fails to find relevant sites, and the list of search hits is very nicely ordered. What more do you want?
Here is a short list of a some of the search engines (including meta search engines) that I have used.