The "wow" moment for me was when I discovered google alerts allows to get alerts as a rss feed (individually for each alert). So this means content discovery through RSS is now possible (the main reason why I started to replace RSS with twitter). Alerts have two modes, one "main articles only" where google applies some blackbox magic to limit the amount of items talking about the same thing, and "all articles".
I'm seriously thinking about using this to build my own privacy oriented clone of google feed. I could have a browser extension performing keyword extraction from my web history to detect my interests, then have google alerts set up on those keywords and a local app chewing all similar content from items through textrank to produce a "news", with a list of sources, maybe sorted through alexa rank. Sounds like quite a job, but worth it.