How can I get google or other search engines to stop hijacking localhost urls with searches in Safari?

So I do quite a bit of PHP development on my MAMP localhost, which is all fine and good. However, frequently when I type in a localhost url (testsite.local or similar), safari will hijack my page load with a google search for the local url instead of loading the page. I know you can prefix the request with http:// to force url recognition, however each time I submit the page, safari trims this part out of the request, so loading another page or manually tweaking the url with a get string causes it to search instead of displaying the page. I really don't want to have to explicitly enter "http://" at the beginning of the url every single time that I change the page. Is there a way to force safari to try to load a url instead of a search by default?