AltaVista
This huge search engine works is an excellent choice for "needle-in-the-haystack" searches for unique surnames.

Ask Jeeves
This search engine is a breeze to use because you can pose your query as a sentence and it will provide not only a set of links, but also additional questions to ask, based on the most popular requests of other users.

Google
Google is a search engine that makes heavy use of link popularity as a primary way to rank web sites. This can be especially helpful in finding good general genealogy sites, but makes it a little more difficult to find the "hidden treasures" such as family surname pages.

Northern Light
This search engine features one of the largest indexes of the web, the ability to cluster documents by topic, and a set of "special collection" documents (magazines, databases, etc.) which often can't be found by other search engines.