Simple Searching - Yahoo and Google! (honorable mention)
Advanced Searching - Northern Light and HotBot (honorable mention)
Metasearch (search multiple search engines at once) - MetaCrawler and SavvySearch (also notable)
News Search - No one site does it all. "We recommend that you cobble together the best tools from the sites we looked at, using Northern Light News for headline searches, Yahoo! News for well -rounded current-events research, and Excite NewsTracker to follow topics of interest.
Kids' search - Ask Jeeves for Kids and LycosSafetyNet (for older kids)