I don't know why it took me so long to figure it out, but I realized recently that, rather than being "dead" text, the entries in my "recent googles" sidebar should be links leading to the matching pages. I've hacked my recent googles script to enable this feature, but the hack has stretched the script (which was quick-n-dirty to begin with) to the limit. The script really needs to be reimplemented as a ruby script, which I'll get around to, oh, any day now.