Safari "Failed to open page" when google searching from URL bar

Hi folks, I've aways used Safari since I bought my first Mac a long time ago and aways loved it, but in the last year or so I'm constantly having this issue where I type some search terms on the URL bar and instead of googling it Safari displays a message saying "Safari can't Open the Page", the tab title says "Failed to open page" and the search bar displays the terms URL encoded (e.g. apple%20iphone%2013%20pro%20max ). Its like its treating the search terms as an URL instead of a search.

This behavior occurs about 60% of the time but its enough to drive me crazy because since I'm a developer I use Google A LOT and since this started to happen Safari became unusable and I had to switch Chrome, but I'd like to come back to Safari since I miss the iOS integration.