Thanks to Greg Linden's careful eye on Google Labs one can start to see some of the value of all those PhD's at Google. First, PLDI (amongst other things) expert Jeff Dean, along with Sanjay Ghemawat, cooks up a domain specific programming model and implementation that allows J. Random Hacker at Google to easily crunch lots of data across many machines. Next UNIX legend Rob Pike and team take the baton and start sloshing around petabytes of data at a time by building a new language on top of Dean's work.
When you have a toolbox with gadgets like this in it, tasks such as blog analysis and aggregation are cast in a much different light. High end toolmakers are major force multipliers in military speak.