Remember to be careful with upper and lower case. Search engines like Altavista and Infoseek ignore case if everything is typed in lower case but will match the case if anything is typed in upper case. Although the results can be interesting, they rarely take advantage of the powerful features available in each individual search engine and generally rely on a lowest-common denominator of features. Each search engine usually has a Help or tips button close to the search box and I highly recommend taking a look at it. Using some of the more advanced features of some search engines, you can restrict your search to government web sites, search for images, sounds, and even pages that link to a particular web site.
Search engines have their limits, however.
First, they are updated every few weeks or months, so you may end with dead links - links that go nowehere. Second, the search engine may not index all of the available web pages at a given site. For a while, one of the search engines would index more than 600 pages at a single site. Most importantly, they are not able to index databases that many web sites now use. For example, the United Nations web site has databases of very useful documents that you will never find using search engines.