Local search is a big deal for Rosenberg, obviously, and he's big on making the point that Google only tries to show "good ads" - i.e. other "Brand X" search engines would put a lot of bad ads on the "dog parks" search...
The barbie example was about personalization in that it's OK and perhaps expected for Rosenberg to search on that since he has a young daughter.
The [cheese recipes] search was an example of "one-box" refinement with Google Base. Including a box as below: