These are some of the bigger and better search engines on the Web. I've listed them in order of my personal preference.
I really like Google. It has one of the most sophisticated screening filters in the search engine business. You always get good results with Google. They also have a really good Web Directory you can browser through. It's not as large as Yahoo!'s, but it has plenty of quality sites listed. The image above is nested between <a> tags and is an image link leading to Google. All links on this page open in a separate window (TARGET="_blank"). The image has a horizonal "gutter" of 10 pixels.
Yahoo! is one of the oldest and most respected search engines and Web directories around. I believe that their directory is the largest. Yahoo! is huge. It's services include free e-mail, a great instant messaging/conferencing service (including audio and video), and some great online games you can play with other people over the internet. I've removed the border from this image because it looked odd.
MSN.com is Microsoft's general issues web site. It inlcudes a good search engine and web directory. It is also the home of two well known services: HotMail and MSN Messenger. You can sign up for one and use the same user name and password for the other. MSN.com also has news, your local weather, sports, entertainment, and much, much more. They even have their own web browser that you can download. As you might expect, it's based on Internet Explorer Technology.
NBCi.com is NBC's web site. As you might expect it's full of news including multimedia news clips. It also has a good search engine. It's easy to use advanced search features. I've made a big border around this link of 10 pixels just to experiment. I've also added horizontal whitespace around the image of twenty pixels. Sort of pushes the text around. All you need to do to make this type of page is to make image links and ALIGN the images "left" and "right". Make a gutter and borders as you see fit and then just type a paragraph or two. Remember to always code the image first and them the text you want to flow around it.
Try using a background color and image for this page. You should get comfortable with using background colors and hexadecimal code. Once you've coded a page similiar to this one, you've finished Beginning HTML and are ready to move on to Beginning CSS. You might even want to make a detour and learn how to upload your page to a free or commercial server.