Check out some of these alternatives to Google:

www.lii.org

The Librarians Internet Index contains human evaluated web sites and can save you time trying to determine the credibility of information found on the web.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html

The American Memory project from the Library of Congress. Has many great photographs and essays about important American people and historical movements.

www.grokker.com

Has a meta-search feature that incorporates results from Yahoo, Wikipedia and Amazon books. Results can be displayed in a visual map format based on the number of hits returned by the search.

www.hakia.com

Displays results grouped by categories and the content scope includes consumer health, medicine, law and finance. Users can do side by side comparisons of results from Hakia and Google.

www.cuil.com

One of the new kids on the block. The name of the search engine is pronounced "cool." Displays results in a column format and offers groups of results by category.