It's admittedly a corner case, but I've searched phrases that contain URLs and have had them get treated as a URL rather than search phrase in Chrome. In that case, I just drop to google.com and issue the search from there.
I actually run into this one (or its opposite, a URL getting treated as a search) fairly frequently, which is pretty annoying every time.
ctrl-k works as "go to search box" in both browsers. For Chrome, that means focussing on the address bar and presetting it to "? ".
Nifty. That would certainly do the trick. Thanks!
If you prefix your query with a ? it will be sent to your default search provider instead.
Thanks for the tip. I was unaware. But of course, if I have to think about it, it's failed its primary function of pretending I shouldn't have to care :-P