I found a way to access google really quickly from IE.
If you add www.google.com to your favorites and change it's name to "..." (or something else easy to type). Now you can just type cmd-L to highlight the address bar, type "...", and hit return to go to google.
You can also use this for the google browser button search. I named it ",,,". Typing that in the address bar opens up the dialog to enter search text without even loading the google homepage.
[Editor's note: You can do a similar thing in Mozilla using keywords, as explained in this hint.]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020620231704724