Search It: Google From Wherever You Are
Sometimes it’s the little things that make your day go more smoothly. One such thing is the cool and elegant freeware utility, Search It.
With Search It installed, when you press a hot key a simple search field pops up (sort of the way the Quicksilver dialog works).

To look something up on the web, instead of moving your mouse pointer to the Dock, finding your browser’s icon, clicking on your browser’s icon, then mousing to the browser’s search field in order to type your search keywords, with Search It you just press a hot key and type in your search topic wherever you happen to be at the time. Different hot keys will search different sites.
Search It’s developer, Jaroslaw Szpilewski, thinks that multistep procedure is a waste of time, and given the literally dozens of times I repeat it in the run of a day, I have to agree. Szpilewski is one of the many hobbyist programmers in the Mac orbit who have created useful tools to streamline their daily work and generously decided to share them with the Mac-using community.

Search It is completely free and requires OS X 10.5.4 or later.
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I just have the Dashboard set to my bottom-left Hot Corner. Hit that and I’ve got a search box there…
I’m a quicksilver guy, so when I was really glad to find out about their websearch feature on http://guides.macrumors.com/Quicksilver
Why not try the more mighty than this tool successor of quicksilver: http://code.google.com/p/qsb-mac/
can’t live without google huh :)
what’s wrong with alt-apple-f?
it works nicely and i’m sure i’ll use it. but there really needs to be an option to remove that stupid s! from the toolbar. Maybe somebody good with terminal could….
I’ve become a fan of Google’s Quick Search Bar mentioned by bullitt above.
I agree with bullitt and Andrew above: Google Quick Search Box works just fine for me.