An article by Keith Hammonds in FastCompany attempts to dig into our favorite search company and present the core principles of Google. The link has been kicking around the blogosphere, but not with much analysis to my mind.
The article is interesting to me for two reasons. Primarily it has details of how Google News came to be and where it's going. Secondarily, the type of people Google hires is really interesting. Holzle is/was a hardcore programming language design and implementation guy. Norvig is a longtime AI and dynamic languages (Lisp and Python) hacker. Bharat was more of a networking, distributed systems type. Google goes after really good people who can stretch themselves.
Oh and the company has that passion and paranoia so often exhibited in Redmond, WA. It actually might not be overstating the case to say that Google is "the Microsoft of search engines."