A search engine is a database of text stored from millions of home pages. You visit the search engine site and provide some key words, and the server makes it's best guess what pages you would be interested in. You then visit those sites that the searc h engine found. The search engine may have last visited the site months ago, so the sites they suggest may not always work or the page may have changed since the search engine last visited it. There are lots of different search engines and each works a bit differently. Some index all the text they have ever encountered, some index only certain portions of a page. Some are faster or slower than others, and that tends to change as si tes become more popular and upgrade their equipment. It can be quite tedious to search all the different search engines. My own advice is to learn to use one well. My favorite used to be Lycos but recently I have prefe rredAltaVista.
Here are some standard search engines...
This is by no means a complete list.
Then there are lots of pages that combine lots of search engines in one place, here are a few. There are probably much better ones out there to be found. The trick is for you to learn a few places you like to use to search. If you explore the list above a nd bookmark a couple of them you probably won't need these, but here are a few anyway.
You could find more like this at Yahoo or The InterNIC
A search engine that can't go unmentioned, though it is more for usenet news than it is for the web is Deja News Often you will be able to find a Usenet thread where the topic you are searching for is mentioned, and that is usually followed up (in a Usenet posting) with suggestions of URLs to try. This round-about way of searching for URLs often works when a search engine does not, or when you are searching for a topic that is very current and has not yet been indexed by the major web search engines.