Many people are struggling to find the benefits of the so-called Awesome Bar as one member so truthfully pointed out, the smart tag makes your viewing "illicit" sites more obvious, particularly when people are peering over as you're typing keywords in tongue.gif

Anyway, for those of us who are too lazy to clear their history at the appropriate times, there are two steps to disabling its function entirely:

1. Type about:config into the location bar and change the value browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped to true. After this, you need to restart Firefox. All this does is make it so that Firefox only searches the URLs you have typed and not the titles of pages.

2. Install the Old Location Bar extension. This changes the location bar so that it looks like how it looked in Firefox 2. As of me writing this post, it is an experimental addon so you will need to register to the Firefox addon service to install it.