Check out these research tools.
Blekko is a new designed search engine that allows for different unique searches compared to Google or Bing.
Bing is Microsoft's search engine. It is highly comparable to Google.
Google is the dominant search engine on the web currently.
Metacrawler searches the most popular search engines and gives you the top results in each of those search engines.
Free online access to the Wolfram/Alpha computational knowledge engine: answer questions; do math; instantly get facts, calculators, unit conversions, and real-time quantitative data and statistics; create plots and visulatizations; and access vast scientific, technical, chemical, medical, health, business, financial, weather, geographic, dictionary, calendar, reference and general knowldege - and much more.
Search Google for scholarly articles, patents, and journals.
Gale Database provides a source for biographies.