Matt Cutts is a well known Google software engineer who got into search engines in college while he was working on his Ph.D.
“The computer science department there makes you take two outside classes, so I took classes from the Information and Library Science department about search engines. It turned out that search engines were really exciting stuff: term frequency times inverse document frequency and all that stuff.”
Aaron Wall’s interview with Matt is very informative as they talk about everything from spam to algorithms to…volleyball. I think this is one of the better interviews Aaron Wall has gotten to do.