I have just tried it and it's working fine. Typing an address in the search box goes straight to the location. Both keyboard and on-map street view arrows are working fine too.
Hard to know why you are having problems but it sounds like the app is freezing up. It could be an issue with both storage and processing capability if you have other several other apps running in the background
Google Earth stores images and information from previous searches so you can go to those places faster. As you have used it before, you may need to clear this from your cache to save memory space. Close other apps to make the Google Earth app respond faster (or at all in your case).