A basic Google search can be quick and often broadly effective, but will not always find everything you need. Effective research should use a number of search tools to cover material not retrieved by a basic Google search. Using the advanced functions of Google, and/or specialised search engines, will get you more specific search results so you don't have to look through irrelevant results, and may find specifically relevant information that otherwise may not be available.
Google Groups searches email posts from discussion groups and list serves, including their archives. Specialists/Experts in areas often discuss their concerns in email lists and discussion groups, and this information is not generally searchable through normal search engines. Once in the search engine, you can narrow down the search to specific lists that may be relevant to your research.
The Internet Archive aka The Wayback Machine, searches for old versions of web pages that are stored in its database, some of which may no longer be online. Useful to look at historical versions of websites. Searches by URL and keyword.
Google News searches 4,500 English-language news web pages worldwide. You can narrow down by region and it includes an historical search.
Google News Archive provides access to scanned versions of old newspapers. A timeline view is available to quickly see what dates are available for the selected newspapers.
Yahoo News will keyword search across thousands of news sources, plus the Yahoo full coverage which includes human sorted news stories.
Note: The Library also has subscription databases that contain news archives. For more information see the guide Finding News.