For searching in Hacker news, I saved the URL 'https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%s' with the search key 'hn'. So when I want to search something around here, I just type
hn something
which then replaces the %s variable with 'something'
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=something
There is Javascript code that allows for two or more arguments, but saving that as a bookmarklet isn't as neat.