Popular search engines such as Yahoo and AltaVista are fine for locating web pages on a general subject, but for more specific material like news, music and pictures, you need a specialist search tool.
News junkies have a number of good news search engines to choose from.
My current favourite is Moreover. It gathers headlines from more than 1,500 sources and groups them into 300-odd subjects. You can scan current stories at the site or sign up to have headlines emailed to you on particular subjects on a daily or weekly basis. Also worth visiting is News Index. It allows you to search for current news stories appearing on more than 300 news sites.