Live Search has been very popular recently in the web 2.0 world. I was recently working with a desktop application, in which I wanted to provide a similar feature. You have JTable displaying the data you fetched from somewhere (database etc.) and you provide a simple text field using which the table can be filtered. It works just like your Firefox History side bar search. You can call the method using the KeyListener so that it looks very "alive" :-)

Here's the LiveSearchTableModel implementation you can use to create live filtering of JTable rows.