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 key

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.