I think that's an ok thing. I used to scoff at this sort of behavior but no longer - users who do this are just doing the same thing I do in the address bar, except they're taking up a whole page and an extra click. The address bar is probably too ephemeral and hard to understand.

It's probably a good hint that browsers could find success at imitating a similar search interface in the new page/new tab UI. Offer a clean page with a text search field, with very fast results that have good context.

Chrome and FF have a "View History" page with search, but it seems to be fixed by date and with no way to sort for relevance. IE doesn't appear to have a history search (I think this is baked into Windows search instead?).