ACM Queue has an interview with Matt Wells, the one man propietor of the Gigablast search engine. Lots of nice morsels in here, including the observation that PageRank is a bit of a red herring when it comes to Google's success. And if carefully engineered, you can do a heck of a lot with only 8 commodity class computers.
Thanks to John Battelle (two ts, two ls, two es) for the pointer.