Yahoo is the Internet's most popular web portal. It doesn't necessarily have the best search engine, but it has chat, finance, news, and plenty of other things to waste your precious study time.  Check out Yahoo Pager.

Probably the best informational search engine, for finding information that might actually pertain to your schoolwork and real life, is Infoseek.

The best overall, and easiest to use search engine would have to be HotBot.  It's easy to limit your search here with pull-down menus instead of having to know some cryptic command seequence.

If you want a search engine to search all the search engines, check out MetaCrawler.  It's a savior sometimes when you just can't get what you want.

Other search engines to try, if none of these are 'doing it' for you, are: Excite, Lycos, Snap and Go.com.