With little effort you can make your site a little more search friendly, it’s possible to embed some xml into your site which your browser can use in its search box. Most modern browsers support OpenSearch, which is what this xml fragment is using.
The first step is to create the following xml, but replace the bits that are specific to your site:
1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
2: <OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
3: <ShortName>SharePoint Search</ShortName>
4: <Description>Search for SharePoint</Description>
5: <Url type="text/html" method="get" template="http://YourSite/SearchCenter/results.aspx?k={searchTerms}"/> 6: <Image width="16" height="16">http://YourSite/favicon.png</Image>
7: <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
8: <SearchForm>http://YourSite/SearchCenter/</SearchForm>
9: </OpenSearchDescription>
In the master page, you will need to refer to this xml file:
1: <link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" href="/Style%20Library/OpenSearch.xml" title="SharePoint Search">
Finally you can drop down the search provider box in your browser to select your new search provider, there is no need to browse to the search centre again.
Little things like this can help entrench searching as the primary navigation method in an organisation.