1) Crawling is now continuous, and fast. You no longer have to wait months for an index update to see a new site on the Googles. Even pages well down the head of the importance distribution get crawled, indexed, and searchable in minutes.
2) Search in Japanese is ridiculously better. Just trust me on this. It has gone from being Hotbot2001 to (English) Google 2005 quality, which is impressive given the natural language problems Japanese throws at you, and the underdeveloped state of the link graph.
3) The Google symbiosis with particular sites on the Internet - most relevantly to my interests, Wiki and StackOverflow - has successfully incentivized the creation of sufficient basic and in-depth content that it is virtually inconceivable that you can come up with a generic English term and have a total failure on it. (e.g. the top ten for [manatees] will now exceed an eighth grade science report in informational content, which was a very hit or miss proposition in 2000.)
4) Google seems to have gotten over themselves in one critical respect: they used to vocally glorify non-intervention in the SERPs, as if G were the blind oracle of the net. This lead to truly stupid issues like a particular neoNazi group ranking at #1 for "Jew" and Google running an AdWords ad against "Jew" to explain that Google was content neutral between Jews and Nazis and in this case the Nazis just happened to be more loved by The Algorithm so there.
I don't know about internally, but on the basis of external evidence, Google is now willing in search quality on the behalf of users. This is a good thing. (Now if they were humble and cautious about wielding immense power, that would be a good thing, too. I get the persistent impression that they still think of themselves as the wee little underdogs, cuddly academics in the dorm room, rather than being Ma Bell.)