Search Engines
General
Google of course. Be sure to master the finer points, like OR and site: and so forth.
Yahoo of course. A pared-down version of the interface is at AllTheWeb.

People
Langenberg White Pages provides a coordinated search form that can send searches to white page directories at InfoSpace, Dex, Switchboard, YP, Yahoo, and Verizon.
AnyWho from AT&T will search for people, places, and businesses.
Also, it helps to check sites that list people search resources, such as NetTrace or Pandia.
Deeper public records searching can yield results as well. Good resources of free public records is at SearchSystems.net, Public Record Finder, and Background Network. Another good aggregator of searches is Pretrieve.

News
Yahoo News is a nice portal into the news culled from a slew of sources.
Google News provides searching for news from various sources, though it’s been accused of bias in what it features.