This is very interesting. There are a lot of brand-sensitive client types such as healthcare organizatons and higher education who would love this. I do have one question though.
According to Wikipedia's list of software and search engines that support OpenSearch, only Google Chrome is on the list. [1]
Google as a search engine is not listed. The screenshot in the article is also in Chrome.
I wonder if this feature is supported in Firefox or IE.
It didn't work for me, I got the "Vacation rentals, private rooms, sublets by the night - Accommodations on Airbnb" as page title entering from both searches.
The alternative to Google doing it, would be your browser fetching every single page, reading the meta tag, retrieving the XML, parsing it and then displaying the contained title tag. Without trying Firefox, I can pretty safely say that's not happening in the milliseconds that it takes for Google to get me my results and my browser to render them fully.
According to Wikipedia's list of software and search engines that support OpenSearch, only Google Chrome is on the list. [1]
Google as a search engine is not listed. The screenshot in the article is also in Chrome.
I wonder if this feature is supported in Firefox or IE.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch
edit: tested in Firefox, it works. this is great!