Started out as Ask Jeeves -- first engine to use natural language searching. Still a search engine, but it now publishes magazine-type articles and is owned by Google.
Microsoft's search engine. Interactive image on the home page changes daily. Can browse popular topics or search by category from the menu: Images, Videos, Maps, & News.
Certainly the best known, with dozens of added features like image searching, maps and shopping. Extensive advanced search capabilities allow fine-tuning for better results.
Why use a single search engine when you can use a Meta? All web search engines are based on algorithms --complex series of lexical orders -- when they are combined, they may actually compete/delete results from some searches. Combining results from two or more engines assures the researcher of a more complete list of informative websites.