Finding people is a slightly different issue. Search engines allow you to find web pages which contain any combination of terms you want. Your request is actually searched in an index created by a robot which automatically visits all the web pages it can find. A quick and easy place to start is Metacrawler , a service which automatically refers your question to several other services and organizes the answers. Alta Vista and Excite are worth exploring too.
Indexes are more selective than searches.
They are compiled by people, and the entries are organized by category and sometimes screened for quality. In fact, any web page which has links to other pages is an index of sorts. Among the first, and still the best known general index is Yahoo . Don't forget the useful web information collected by the NCWC Library . For email, try this explanation .