Search vs URL

Something that happens to me quite a lot is when I’m trying to type into the search box in Safari I accidentally type into the Address field, and end up going to latest-news-on-apple.com which of course drops out with an error.  But when you think about it URLs almost never go in the search field and search terms never go in the Address field.  Why are they not the same bar with some intelligent URL parsing technology to separate the two?

I know some browsers use a single letter keyword to indicate a search rather than a URL but surely when Google Calendar can figure out when to put an appointment just from the natural language then a browser can figure out what’s a URL and what’s not?  A keyword search is nice – but it could be so much more.

And the possibilities go on – how about some AI that intelligently figures out trends in image searches and redirects likely image searches from web search?  I suspect Google already does something like this in their search algorithm by placing likely hits at the top.

Note to Apple, Microsoft et al:  Feel free to steal this idea and use it without credit to me – as long as we get better browsers out of it!