Excellent Papers for 2011 (Google)
Corinna Cortes and Alfred Spector of Google Research have collected up great papers published by Glooglers in 2011.
To be sure there are the obligatory papers on searching and natural language processing but there are also papers on audio processing, human-computer interfaces, multimedia, systems and other topics.
Many of these will be the subjects of separate posts in the future. For now, peruse at your leisure and sing out when you see one of special interest.