How to get rid of Safari 5’s “awesome bar”

Obviously this wasn't a solution at the time you asked the question, but if you're looking for more basic, it's now built into the latest version of the operating system.

Safari in Lion does seem to remember the history for each tab when it restores on re-launch. If you were using 10.5.8 because you use PPC hardware, or don't want to buy the upgrade, this doesn't help, but it if Lion is a viable choice, it does seem to work very smoothly.

Safari maintains this information internally, but I've only been able to make it divulge the actual URL by enabling the web inspector (Option-Command-I) after you have enabled the Debug menu at the bottom of the advanced tab in Safari Preferences (Command-,). You can of course drag the URL out of the search window to get a link (instead of copying which just copies the visible search terms).

You will see the Full URL under the Location disclosure in the bottom right corner of your screen. The only good part of this is the text is copyable once you've navigated and selected it. It might be possible to write a Safari extension to perform this copy, but I have not found one to do this yet.

As provided by Arjan you can also make a bookmark and use JavaScript to retrieve the URL.

javascript:(function(){window.location.href=window.location.href.replace("search?", "#");})()

You might also be interested in gDirectLinks or it's more fully fledged sibling LinkThing which change the way Safari renders google search terms and works with URL handling from google.