Definitely not a joke. Well, perhaps that specific instance is, but at Yahoo! many of the most common search terms were domains; one argument had internally for not putting cursor focus in the search bar was precisely because people just used it as if it were the address bar, and the appetite to support that use case was low. (Source: ex-Yahoo! staff, albeit not in search and with a fallible memory).

it's a meme but i've also seen it happen.