A couple of things:

It's going to be pretty hard to identify those motors from just a picture. If you can locate any writing or numbers on them, it might help to jog someone's memory. Knowing what cars they came out of would also be helpful.

As far as being a total newbie, I suggest you make yourself not a total newbie. It's not practical for me, or anyone, to write down EVERYTHING about electric R/C aircraft every time a "total newbie" pops up. There's a lot of information to digest. I suggest that you should start working on educating yourself about the basics of aerodynamics and R/C. Learn the terms, and how things relate to each other. As far as a good resource, you've got the whole WWW. You're not going to find all of this is some neatly packaged little nutshell, and it's going to take some time to get it all straight in your head. Since when has anything good ever been easy?

You can always experiment... Get yourself a cheap foamie glider from WalMart, glue the motors on, and start experimenting.