Blogger Om Malik notes that the key component to Google is the data center and server technology that produce search results at lightning fast speeds.

Brian Bershad

"The faster (and more efficient) its infrastructure, the more easily Google can keep serving the ad-based money machine," Malik writes.

The story caught my eye because Google's recent hires from the University of Washington computer science department-- Craig Chambers and Brian Bershad -- are setting up a new group in the company's Fremont office to improve the back-end infrastructure at the search giant.

Malik's post helps put into perspective the importance of Google's beachhead in Seattle.

Consider this quote from Google vice president of engineering Shiva Shivakumar in my post on the UW profs moving to Google last month to work on infrastructure technologies in the data center.

"Building out those systems actually requires a lot of cutting-edge research. A lot of that work has been going on in Mountain View (Calif.) for the last few years and we wanted to have a second place where we can build up an incredibly high-powered group where we can build out the next generation of a lot of these different systems."

I am not sure if the proprietary hardware that Malik refers to will be built by the Seattle team, but it will be interesting to see if the software to power those devices is created here.