Interview: Craig Silverstein (Google's CTO)
"Without ticking off all the paid search engine placement folks, what it really comes down to is if you have a site that other people are interested in, then that's really the key?
Yes, once you have that it's not difficult to get good search engine placement. But for a lot of people they may not have such a site."

06/25/01 update: Salon interview with Monika Henzinger, Google's director of research. 01/06/02 update: she has a home page, with these slides on web information retrieval.

08/16/01 update: another interview with Silverstein (at Webtechniques).

08/19/01 update: When Larry meets Sergey.