From bsmedberg [benjamin.smedbergs.us].. but a little more automated.

1) In Firefox 3.1, copy the following block of code and paste it into the “Code:” line in the Error Console (cmd-shift-J) then hit enter:

C=Components;d=C.classes['@mozilla.org/browser/nav-history-service;1'].getService(C.interfaces.nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection;for(o=[],c=97;c<123;c++){h=String.fromCharCode(c);q=d.createStatement('SELECT title t, url u FROM moz_inputhistory JOIN moz_places ON id=place_id WHERE input LIKE \''+h+'%\' ORDER BY use_count DESC LIMIT 1');if(q.step())o.push(['<b>',h,'</b>: <a href="',q.row.u,'">',q.row.t,'</a>'].join(''))}open('data:text/html,'+o.join('<br/>\n'))

2) View source to copy the generated html to put in your blog. (I’ve added emphasis for what I was trying to match.)

a: Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more
b: Bank of America | Home | Personal
c: Capital One Online Banking | Capital One Online Banking
d: Digg – All News, Videos, & Images
e: edilee
f: Firefox Builds • mozillaZine Forums
g: Video Game Cheats, Reviews, FAQs, Message Boards, and More – GameFAQs
h: Hulu – House
i: The Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
j: Joystiq
k: Kotaku, the Gamer’s Guide
l: The LLVMdev November 2008 Archive by thread
m: Mac Rumors: Apple Mac Rumors and News You Care About
n: Gaming Discussion – NeoGAF
o: OrderStatus
p: Planet Mozilla
q: PhD Qualifying Examination | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
r: Google Reader
s: JavaScript Shell 1.4
t: tinderbox: Firefox
u: Gmail – Search results – edilee@gmail.com (unread)
v: Apple – Support – Discussions – New MacBook connected to external VGA …
w: Firefox3.1/StatusMeetings – MozillaWiki
x: xkcd – A Webcomic – Drapes
y: Bug 465076 – Yet another Ctrl+Tab / All Tabs design revision
z: Craig Zilles, Department of Computer Sciences

The pages listed here are those that I visit frequently, so it’s not the best way to see the word searching ability of the location bar; however, it’s interesting to see that all but one site matches on the title. It’s also neat to know that I only need to type a single letter and hit enter [addons.mozilla.org] to go to those sites. 🙂

Aza recently suggested a zero-configuration speed dial interface [azarask.in], so I started hacking on an add-on to do just that. After plenty of user feedback and reviews over the last couple days, you can get Auto Dial 4 [addons.mozilla.org] as a public add-on without needing to log in.

The add-on creates a page that fills up the screen with links to your frequently visited pages with the most frequently visited ones at the top being the easiest to click. As you go further down in the list, the links become smaller for the pages that you less frequently visit.

Quick access to frequently visited pages on new tabs (Ctrl/Cmd-T) (larger)

The Auto Dial page shows up every time you open a new tab. So after you hit Ctrl/Cmd-T, you can type into the Smart Location Bar as usual to search through your history as well as easily access your frequently visited pages with a click. With the Auto Dial page, you can click any of the pages like a normal link (middle-click or Ctrl/Cmd-click to open in a tab).

Other features in the current version include letting you to type the page’s number to jump right to it (hover over a link to see its number), moving selection with the keyboard and stripping off “http://” from URLs. There’s also a collection of about:config preferences to tweak to your liking: how many pages from the same site to have, how big the largest button should be, how fast the number of buttons grows, and how long you get to type the page number.

Auto Dial Add-on [addons.mozilla.org]

“.. adds incredible functionality. It’s like Active desktop for the browser.” “i love it! instantly my became my first useful home page” – Michael, zac

Thanks again for the feedback through email, my blog, IRC, and AMO.

Firefox 3’s Smart Location Bar learns to show you the page you want when you type in some search terms. In many cases, it already knows what you want when you type just a single letter. So for many people, going to a page is very efficient — only requiring 3 key strokes: typing the letter, pressing [down] or [tab], and hitting enter.

If you want to be even more efficient, take a look at Enter Selects [addons.mozilla.org]. This add-on gets rid of the middle step for you by automatically selecting the first result when you hit enter.

Pressing enter will select the first result

If you don’t want the first result to be selected, press [esc] or [left]/[right] to close the suggestions. However, if you’re typing in a URL or editing one from the suggestions, it’s smart enough to do what you want. You can even type in a domain like “ed.agadak.net” and not worry about it automatically selecting the first result.

“I install this on every instance of FF3 I get my hands on thus saving buckets of extraneous keystrokes a day.” “Wow this just makes the AwesomeBar so much more usable.” – danhorst, pacifika [addons.mozilla.org]

Quick update on my other add-ons. The functionality of Hide Unvisited, Edit Middle, and Show Keywords have made it in to the nightly versions of Firefox 3.1, so if you’ve already got those installed, you won’t need them for the next major release.

I’ve continued to help Firefox users to get to the pages they want faster with features like multi-word search (just press space — great for matching titles) and adaptive learning (you’ll only need to type a single letter to get what you want). I even wrote an add-on that takes you to the top listed site by just pressing enter 🙂, so now you just need to type 1 letter, and hit enter, and you’re where you want to be (no need to press down first)!

So in Firefox 3.5, there’s some new ways to change what shows up in the Smart Location Bar such as restricting results to show only your history (and not your unvisited bookmarks) or matching only in the URL instead of also in the title. Additionally, you can see your Smart Keywords queries show up in the drop down.

You can restrict the search to your history by typing “^”, or bookmarks with “*”, or tagged pages with “+”. To make what you’ve typed match only in the URL type “@”, and for title/tags only use “#”.

You can first start typing something you want to find like “mozilla”..

All results that match "mozilla"

Then realize that there’s too many results and you know it’s a page that you’ve tagged, so you restrict the results with “+”..

Restricting "mozilla" to tagged pages

Then continue narrowing the results by typing more words..

Quickly finding pages out of thousands

If you prefer the results to always restrict to history and match only in the URL, you can go to about:config and change the corresponding preferences to nothing (edit the value and delete the special character). This way you can always be only searching your visited history and not worry about matching in the title. If you’ve installed Hide Unvisited [ed.agadak.net], you can uninstall it and just change browser.urlbar.restrict.history to “” (nothing).

Preferences to change default restrict/match behavior

As with the Hide Unvisited add-on, restricting to history will only show pages that you have visited and are stored in your history. This means if you visit a bookmark, it will still show up even when restricting to history. However, you can select the entry from the location bar and hit Delete, or delete pages from the History Panel, or just Clear History to make them disappear.

If you don’t like the standard characters to enable restrict/match, you can modify the values from about:config to be whatever you want. They can be single characters, whole words, even words in other languages.

One last thing about Keywords is that you can now see what you’re going to search with a Smart Keyword Bookmark. You can even assign multiple bookmarks the same keyword so one can be the default Wikipedia search and another can use I’m Feeling Lucky [google.com]. You can uninstall Show Keywords [addons.mozilla.org] if you’re using that for Firefox 3.

Choose from multiple Smart Keyword Searches