I definitely agree with you that some topics that I come across, I forgo the search engine and just do "w John Politician" (w is my wikipedia search Firefox keywod.) This works for notable people, math concepts and generally topics which can be easily quantized.

However, I tend to rely more and more on the search engine when I need to find something specific that I sort of remember stumbling across in the past but can't put my finger on. For instance, queries like "site:nytimes.com friedman middle east" saved me more times than I can count.

Yes, the internet is generally much more organized today than it was circa ~1998, but I just see it as a cleaner input to Google. Knowing how to Google correctly (not as common or obvious as I once thought) is one of the most powerful tools you can have for looking up information.

Methinks you ignore the fact that the easiest way to look something up on, say, Amazon or Wikipedia is: CMD-Tab to browser, CMD-T for new tab, CMD-OPT-F (or CMD-L Tab) to the Google field in the browser toolbar, type what you're looking for, then click on the obvious Amazon or Wikipedia link on the resulting Google page.

Search hasn't gotten less frequent. It's just so fast that it's faded into ubiquity. I find it faster than typing "wikipedia.org" directly into the address field, even with autocomplete. (The problem is that, once wikipedia loads, you have to navigate to its own search widget and enter a term, then click on the resulting page. And that ignores the very real possibility that Google is better than Wikipedia's own search function. Meanwhile, I could solve all of this by setting up a Firefox keyword, but that only works in the browsers where I've set it up, and it only works for those who know what they are and remember to use them.)

Thanks for giving the shortcut to the search box - now is there another keyb shortcut to choose a specific search engine, like Amazon or eBay from the dropdown?

Heh. I'll let you in on a little secret: I have never remembered the direct shortcut to the search box. All I remember is CMD-L. So I just use CMD-L followed by Tab.

I'm not sure there's a way to do what you suggest. You could, of course, use those aforementioned Firefox keywords. Or, if you've got a Mac, set up shortcuts in Quicksilver (another tool whose subtle points I keep forgetting about).

i wikipedia so much that i should make it my startpage :(

On another note, I have written a small FF searchplugin util to find me publicly available mp3 thru Google, I use Google's suggest/autocomplete on it to find the exact title of the song, and then do search. I tend to agree with mechanical_fish that search has become wayy faster and efficient, and Google no more is a separate site, it feels like a browser feature, just like File->new.

Wikipedia doesn't know everything, but Google does (like answers to some issues I may be having with Rails or mysql with some specific error mesg)! I respectfully disagree with you.