On your third question, make your search more specific. If you just search on "Dallas" then expect to get deluged. If you search "Dallas electric guitar wood headstock neck fret pickup" then you're more likely to get what you want. Try to think up words to include with your search which will only apply to the thing you're looking for.
On your second question, Google groups may help. Or webrings are also useful for that (www.webring.org IIRC). But please note that searching is NOT a replacement for checking through stuff yourself. There's a lot of pages out there, so be prepared to spend some time searching. If it's on page 4 of the Google search, you've done pretty well - you've probably taken 10 minutes at most to find what you wanted. How long would it have taken you to find similar information in a library? Otherwise it's down to finding stuff on Google that looks close, and then checking links off that site, and links from there, and generally hunting around the subject. Persistence is the answer.
For your first question, make sure the site is useful, has information on it which people will want to read, has information on it which is unique to your site (or is not duplicated as well on other sites), and is well-focussed on the topic at hand. If no-one else will want to read your pages, or if you're writing something which Microsoft or someone else has done a million times better, your page will never be seen.
Burke, Google regularly messes with its logo, sometimes for sports events or annual occasions (eg. Christmas), and sometimes just for the hell of it. I do like that current Escher version.