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>they want to go to google to perform a search from a dedicated "search" box rather than a URL input - essentially, they want what the firefox UI gave them.

I would not even be surprised if that kind of user would search "Google" on the dedicated "Search box" because they are more confortable performing the search on the actual Google website than on a UI element inside the browser toolbar.

> one of the other most frequently searched terms on google is "google",

Perhaps one of the most frequent, but surely nowhere near the majority. I'm guessing it's still an incredibly tiny portion of searches. The fact that Google Search also handles this case, for the likely tiny portion of cases where it occurs, seems totally reasonable to me, and hardly an indictment of any browser's UI paradigm.

I don't mean to indict any browser's UI paradigm.

My point was just that you shouldn't draw too many conclusions from user behaviour because user behaviour is often dumb and a poor signal of what users actually want.

the people who don't understand the difference are largely unperturbed by this workflow. which means it satisfies their expectations, even if it isn't optimized for them.