And don't forget to use the bangs that can allow you to check other engines results fast if you need.
For people afraid of getting off google, you can always search something like '!g my-search', it works the same for youtube(!yt), google image(!gi), or even hackernews(!hn)
And of course the best bang is the 'I am feeling lucky' one (!), i.e.: 'hackernews !'