A search engine is an essential tool for finding information on the Information Superhighway. A search engine works by classifying and indexing Web pages.
Search engines differ in their comprehensiveness and quality of indexing.
Some engines, such as AltaVista, index everything, down to the level of the individual word. A search on such an engine will retrieve a lot of documents that may be unrelated to your need. Other search engines, such as Yahoo, use a human reviewer to classify pages by content. A search on such an engine may retrieve only a subset of all the pages out there, but the result will be more focused. My suggestion for class research is to start with Yahoo and switch to the more comprehensive engines as needed.