Every time google adds a new feature I'm impressed by a number of things.
First, I'm impressed at how they are willing to just throw stuff out there, and if they get a lot of heat, they go back to the drawing board (i.e. the Google Web Accelerator). The important thing is that they are willing to try new things and use their users to tell them if it really sucks. I'm sure that there are some things that don't even make it out of the labs, but generally the things that do make it out are decent.
Second, I'm impressed at the things they do with client side web technologies. The interface of maps is pretty great. For those of you that don't quite know what's going on, the maps are divided up into smaller pieces. There is a border outside of your view that is preloaded after the ones in focus are loaded. This allows the scolling to happen in near realtime. There are some other neat tricks they use, and if you're curious, Joel Webber does a great dissection of the technology behind it.
Another great interface is the new "my.google.com" pages (found at http://www.google.com/ig). Although they are about 5 years behind Yahoo! in their implementation, they have come up with some nifty scripting that allows you to customize the page by dragging and dropping the boxes around. The biggest downside is that they don't have a way to lock the page from errant draggings. I can just imagine my grandmother trying to use it and getting confused because she rearranged her page.
The stuff that they do with gMail has been covered before by many others, so I won't bother with that.
Yet another thing that they do that I still don't know where I stand from a security/privacy standpoint is the "recent searches" option. They store all of your searches, plus the pages that you clicked on so that you can go back later and review them. This is similar to a product called filangy (if anyone wants an invite to try it, let me know), but it doesn't require a separate toolbar. The differentiator between google and filangy is that google automagically stores everything whereas filangy requires a manual operation to store a search. Google's is more convenient, but filangy's is more "private."
Anything else that people out there use that they think is great?
