That said, I'd just add that if you just hit o or t it should take you to the command box with the pre-filled command :open or :tabopen respectively. You could type some text and hit Tab to look at auto-complete options for that text.
Also if you ever want to see your search bar for whatever reason:
:set go+=T
Now you should have your entire toolbar, but to access the searchbox I use:
Alt+d -> Tab
OR Ctrl+l -> Tab
To get rid of the unsightly toolbar just use:
:set go-=T
Also: you could open up searchoptions via:
:dia searchengines
and set the keywords for each search engine. For eg: Google -> g, Yahoo -> y, etc.
Now when you need to search just hit o or t and follow up the command with g hello as in: