Altavista is a good search engine. It's very fast and has a large index, but because of its size, it can return irrelevant results. It allows you to use standard Boolean expressions, and offers the ability to search for documents in any of most languages.
Highway 61 is a "fun" kind of metasearcher. A metasearcher searches several different search engines for your search string. You can select your patience level, which will affect the number of search engines searched (kind of). While you wait, you'll be furnished with quotes from famous people.
ScienceDaily is the place to go for the very latest science news. It gives 2-3 page articles on news in about 25 different categories. There is very little advertising, and it loads fast. A superior news source.
Global Change Electronic Edition is the online edition of a newsletter about global warming and climate change. It contains lots of statistics and varying points of view about global warming. This site is well organized, with a great navigation system!
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, with thousands of volunteers from around the world, is a search coordinated online for a special type of prime number called a Mersenne Prime. A prime number is any number that has only two factors, but a Mersenne Prime must be in the form 2^n-1. GIMPS uses its volunteers' spare processor power to search for Mersenne Primes. An excellent site, with an interesting purpose.