The address bar in the browser is totally broken from a usability standpoint.

If you change it, it doesn't reflect the page you are looking at. This means for example that you can get into a screwed up situation where:

  - you are looking at page a

  - page b is being loaded

  - page c is displayed in the address bar

Which is not only highly confusing in itself, it also looks identical to page c being loaded.

There is just no conceivable mental model that non-nerds can build that can predict the behavior of the address bar. When that's the case, people fall back on scripts, in this case "go to google.com; type in what you are looking for; hit return;"

In fact, I've sometimes wondered if you could make a competitor to the web that would be much easier to use.