I get the best results looking for fonts like this:

The search engine I prefer is Google (fast and not tons of ads, good page descriptions so you can generally avoid the "icky" webpages), but most search engines will work with this.

If I am looking for a kind of font, but not neccessarily a specific one, for example a handwritten font, I would type in the following with the quote marks as shown:
"free fonts" handwriting
The quotes around "free fonts" make the search engine look for pages with those words next to each other, rather than including pages that have for example, free kittens and expensive fonts.

If you are looking for a font you know the name of, if it is a one word name, such as Scriptina, you can search for:
"free fonts" Scriptina

If there is more than one word to the specific font you want, such as Girls are Weird (yes, that's a real font and a cute one, too), you can search for:
"free fonts" "Girls are Weird"

It is important to look for the word fonts and not font . When I searched for font I got lots of results totally unrelated to fonts. The word font did not appear anywhere on the page at all. It was contained in the HTML code (the way the webpage is written, not part of what you see).