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Matt Cutts: Wow, great question. A lot of people are like, “Oh Google is so secretive” but if you go back and look at the literature and papers that Google has produced we have actually documented a lot about the mechanics, our data centers and how Google operates.

If you want to go back into the very early days Larry and Sergei have these papers about the anatomy of a large scaled hyper text search engine, PageRank, you can find all of those in Site Seer or Google Scholar and that sort of research search place.

If you are looking for more recent stuff Jeff Dean is a Google fellow and he does amazing talks. He will often talk about amazing things like every programmer should know the difference between how long it takes to do a disc seek versus looking something up in RAM versus doing something across data centers across the country. He does these really great talks so I would look up anything by Jeff Dean.

Another person to do some research on is Oris Osley. He often writes about our data center architecture. Luiz Barroso is another person. We’ll try to insert a few links inside the description of the video but also check out the Google Research team because when they are papers published by Googlers they will often add links to those papers.

A lot of people think it’s hard to find out things about how Google works. Not only do we blog, show up at conferences, listen on forums, do webmaster videos, all these things we also try to talk about what we do in the academic literature. We publish in IEEE and ACM, lots of good stuff along those lines. And so check into that a little bit because there really is a lot of good data about how Google operates in terms of the technology, the machinery and all that sort of stuff. Do check into it because it can be really interesting.