If you're looking for alternatives to the many search engines that are already out there, you might want to take a look at www.oingo.com and www.allthesites.com.
Oingo is a new "meaning-based" search engine that goes beyond searching for just simple text characters. With oingo, you can refine your search based on the actual meaning of your search words and phrases.
Allthesites, while employing more traditional character-based search modes, claims to be the world's largest, fastest search engine. It currently has over 300 million URLs in its database.