Aspies For Freedom

Well...not quite.  The "vacuum tubes" in this case are of the electronic sort (valves).  Most of the UNIVAC tubes were common 25L6 tetrodes.

no you'd end up on top of your past self time michine... in your time michine if yiou stayed in one spot.. just as there leaving.

*draws breathe*
*stops*
*looks puzzled*

:| and...just how the heck did you think of that one?

Sharding
They split up their index across shards, your search query goes to all the shards in parallel  and each returns a set of results, which is recombined by the frontend webserver.

The spider is only used for building the index, not searching it

T-1001 works with lots of tiny particles which can move together like a fluid, the processing power is split across all the tiny particles and they automatically seek each other out. Since they're so small, they can change colour to recreate the appearance of any object. You could probably build a real thing fairly similar.

Remote controls work with infrared as the transmission medium. An infrared LED shines out of the remote, and a sensor in the TV/Satellite/VCR/DVD/whatever detects the infrared then decodes it. There are various different modulation schemes and signals that can be used.

I have "CPU design" under hobbies on my CV for a reason

Modern processors have a few components, including a pipeline and branch predictor which i'll ignore for simplicity sake. I will also assume you have a reasonable knowledge of machine code (if not, this is gonna be impossible to grasp).

A simple processor has these parts:

Clock
Instruction Decoder
Instruction Pointer register (in the register files)
Register file(s)
ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit)

The clock causes the IP (Instruction Pointer) to increment by 1, then the instruction decoder is fed an instruction from the location in RAM that the IP is pointing to.
The instruction decoder takes in a word as input, and makes one (and only one) output pin high. This causes other circuitry to be activated which does "something" depending on the instruction. This is best thought of as many different modules that get switched on.
The instruction operands are also available via an internal bus to all the internal circuitry.

One important module, the ALU, handles simple arithmetic - addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Modern processors tend to have multiple ALUs.
Subtraction can be implemented (believe it or not) as a special case of addition (google 2's complement). So can multiplication and division. This is all done using a circuit known as a binary adder - one of the most fundamental circuits of the digital age.

The ALU also implements boolean operations such as AND, OR, NOT, XOR, etc (all of which can be implemented using combinations of NAND gates).

Register files can be implemented in numerous ways. My favourite is to use an OR gate with a loopback, and a NOT gate to reset it, creating a 1-bit cell which can be scaled up into arbitary word lengths.

Output from operations is generally stored into an internal register in the register file, or output back into RAM, or output onto the system bus to external hardware.

There are also other features generally added (such as MMUs - Memory Management Units - used to do virtual memory management and thus enable secure multitasking), but that's the basics.

You could use a spider to do the search itself, but it'd be painfully slow, especially if you lack the kind of bandwidth google has.