Maybe someone could right-click, select View Page Source, then edit that to remove the black bar, or change its color, and save it as a local page? I tried it, and could get the box where you enter search text to be black, but couldn’t get the title bar to be white.
There are plugins, such as Stylish, that adjust stylesheets in that way.
I had the Google News advanced search bookmarked as my entry point. Now it redirects to the news page, with advanced search (minus a feature or two, such as ordering results) as a pop-up.
[thread hijack]And the Yahoo! home page (which I’ve used, on and off, since the “akebono” days) has also changed its layout, so that you see the news Yahoo! wants you to see, instead of what you customized the page to see.[/thread hijack]