Current keyboard shortcuts include:

j or DOWN  -  Selects the next item.
k or UP       -  Selects the previous item.
l or RIGHT   -  Moves to the next category (results, sponsored links, refinements).
h or LEFT    -  Moves to the previous category (results, sponsored links, refinements).
<Enter>       -  Opens the selected result.
/                 -  Puts the cursor in the search box.
n                 -  Moves to the next result, and fetches more results if necessary.
p                 -  Moves to the previous result, reloading earlier results if necessary.
=                 -  Magnifies current item
-                 -  Shrinks current item
A                -  Switches to Accessible Search Results
W               -  Switches to regular Web Search Results

The "A" switches you Accessible Search Results, which identifies and prioritizes search results that are more easily usable by blind and visually impaired users. The "W" switches you back to regular results.

Keyboard Shortcuts For Everyday Use?

For now, the only way to use this search experiment is to use the Firefox 3 browser. If you have "find as you type" turned on in your options you may run into trouble navigating through results using the keyboard. Instead of moving you to the next item, Firefox starts looking for the letter "j" on the current page. However, with that feature shut off, navigation was a breeze - you could j / k back and forth through the list of results with ease.

This isn't really a feature that would work that well for everyday searches where you need to scroll through multiple pages of results in search of relevant articles. However, for informational searches such as those where you want to quickly learn about a subject well-documented on Wikipedia and other highly-ranked and respectable sites, navigating through the results with keyboard shortcuts could be a handy option.

The Accessible View Experiment is something that we could see using more often if there was a way to easily go from the regular Google.com homepage to the experimental Google.com site (perhaps via a keyboard shortcut?). They would also need to work on the find-and-you-type bug because that's a feature not worth giving up for a bit of navigation ease.

Keyboard shortcuts aren't for everyone, but for those of us who really enjoy the option, adding shortcuts to Google is something we could get excited about if the kinks were worked out.

According to Compete last fall, navigational searches make up about 17% of all searches on average, more on Yahoo! and Live than on Google. For well-known web sites, Compete found that about 9 out of the top 10 search terms for that site tend to be some sort of variation on the domain. Surprisingly, people actually often search for entire domain names rather than type them into their browser's address bar.

After a little digging, I found that Kellogg's Yahoo! campaign actually began last December with their holiday TV commercial run. Hitwise reported that that holiday campaign boosted traffic to SpecialK.com and that almost two thirds of that traffic came from searches for "Special K." Consumers were following the advice of the ad, as well, with search traffic to the domain skewing 53% toward Yahoo!

Update: Via Allen Stern, turns out the offline/online search promotion from Special K is even older -- dating back to at least last October. He has some interesting suggestions for taking the concept even further over at his excellent blog.

While I couldn't find out which way the money was flowing, Stephan Pechdimaldji of Yahoo!'s advertising PR team told me that the Special K search campaign had a 10 times better response rate than previous campaigns the company had run on Yahoo! It's hard to say if that indicates that a call to action to search trumps a call to visit a site directly, or if only that TV ads are big traffic drivers.

Either way, search over URL seems to be a trend we're likely to see more of. Advertising search boxes rather than .com names is already all the rage in Japan. Mac developer Cabel Sasser pointed out in March that search boxes with suggested terms are pretty much all you see on ads in Japan, but he wondered if search marketers and spammers might ruin that strategy in the US. That's probably why Kellogg bought the top sponsored result for "Special K" on Yahoo! (and, for good measure, on Google as well).

Still, with the continued rise of the mobile web it would seem that long, unwieldy URLs will become even more cumbersome on devices with limited screen size. That makes search even more important, and driving consumers to your product via search seems like a safe bet.