This is a case where the MS Visual Studio forced on me at work poisons my mind. Ctrl+F brings up some big ugly search modal, while Ctrl+D pops straight to the quick search text box. Whenever I switch from VisStudio to a web browser (or pretty much anything sane), I always catch myself trying to bookmark a page instead of search. (Of course my prefered search key is / but that's not really an option here....)
That 90% of people don't know about 'Find' functions (^F/⌘F)? Boggles.
It might be worth trying incremental search in Visual Studio (it's like "find as you type"). I use it with Emacs keybindings (CTRL-S for forward search, CTRL-R for backward search), but I'd imagine you can bind it to whatever keystroke you want. There is no dialog, you simply hit CTRL-S (or whatever it is bound to), then start typing and it immediately goes to the next occurrence of what you have typed; you hit CTRL-S again to go to the next occurrence.
Incremental search changes the way you navigate text beyond using it for searches. Want to move to particular place in the text file quickly without using the mouse? Pick the most unique string near it and incremental search to move near it, then use regular keyboard movement commands to get to it (if the unique string itself wasn't where you wanted to be).
That 90% of people don't know about 'Find' functions (^F/⌘F)? Boggles.