They do great work in many areas, but the best ones (IMHO, as a systems guy) are the systems papers. In non-systems areas, folks from universities could conceivably do the same research, but for OS/Distributed systems, Google research is the state-of-the-art. There's no point even trying to find fault with their evaluations, because papers are usually submitted well after the system is deployed and operational within Google.<p>Three recent papers at this year's Operating Systems Design and Implementation:
<a href="http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/10/google-at-usenix-symposium-on-operating.html" rel="nofollow">http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2010/10/google-at-usenix-...</a>