Why does Safari believe every search is a url?

Two quirks of Safari, while not life-changing, do bug me, and make me wonder why such unnecessary obstacles occur...

First is that if I wish to search on a subject, item, quote, anything, I can't just type something in the search window and hit enter, as it will always act as if I had entered a url instead of words depicting what I want to search, and so it will bring up an error page, with % in-between most of the words I entered, & telling me that website doesn't exist! HUH???

I have to put something in the window, pause a second or two, until the blue"search with Google" appears, and only then, can I hit enter, to continue with the search! This has never happened with any other browser, but Safari, Why is this going on, and how can I stop it?

Not only that, but if I've copied the terms I want to search, and try to paste it back in (after clearing the window), often it will only offer "Paste & Search", which will obviously bring up the same error window! I have to sometimes click on the window several times, before it offers the options to both "Paste & Search" & just to "Paste", after which I can wait the couple seconds for the "search with Google" to appear, and finally do the actual search.

The other oddity, is when I try to open a new tab. I click on the + sign, and half the time, a new tab opens, the other half of the time, I see a list of "recently closed tabs", which is great, but I clicked the plus sign to open a new one, not one that I've recently closed. If I wanted to do that, I'd have just hit History, where I'd find the list of recently closed tabs. Why this redundancy & inconsistency??