Perhaps it's just me, but for an article about removing Google branding, wouldn't it make sense to show before and after screenshots for those of us without an iPhone?
I actually prefer that button (that launches an action) to be a verb. It does not add ambiguity, because the search provider is not customizable on the iPhone (AFAIK), so it might be for the better off that way. I remember being surprised that it wasn't, when I first got mine about a year ago.
Did they just remove the Google branding or did they remove the search engine branding? I use Yahoo as my search engine so my button says Yahoo! on it.
I quit using Google a couple of years ago because I was getting way too many results that were SEO optimized with no content. I was also tired of Google manipulating my search terms to provide what it thought were other good things to search for but were really not related. I used Yahoo before Google launched so I checked it out again and the results were great, so I stuck with it. I haven't tried going back because it seems like Google has lots of smart people producing things they think are cool, like Wave, Buzz, and Android, that aren't very good search related consumer products.
They left the placeholder text as "Google", which is probably more noticeable considering it's visible 100% of the time that the browser address bar is showing.
