Vimperator and Ctrl+K

Firstly, awesome job figuring out wildoptions

That said, I'd just add that if you just hit o or t it should take you to the command box with the pre-filled command :open or :tabopen respectively. You could type some text and hit Tab to look at auto-complete options for that text.

Also if you ever want to see your search bar for whatever reason:

:set go+=T

Now you should have your entire toolbar, but to access the searchbox I use:

• Alt+d -> Tab

  OR

• Ctrl+l -> Tab

To get rid of the unsightly toolbar just use:

:set go-=T

Also:
you could open up searchoptions via:

:dia searchengines

and set the keywords for each search engine. For eg: Google -> g, Yahoo -> y, etc.

Now when you need to search just hit o or t and follow up the command with g hello as in:

:open g hello

to open a google search page for the word hello

I knew :open behaves essentially like a google search box, but what bothered me was the absence of the auto-suggestions list.

Well, it turns out that set wildoptions=auto turns it on, so with that in mind, here's my workaround:

set wildoptions=auto

noremap <C-k> :open 
inoremap <C-k> <Esc>:open 
cnoremap <C-k> <Esc>:open