Bio-IT world has an interview with David Lipman, director of the NCBI, who mentions that without good content search engines wouldn't be so successful (though you could argue that Google drives the creation of some content through Adsense payments). The most interesting section is about a "Discovery Initiative", where Entrez will try to pull together information from multiple databases hosted at the NCBI and display all the relevant data on one page, rather than just the current method of presenting links to separate pages individually.
David Lipman is also an editor of the newly launched Biology Direct journal, an open access journal published by BioMed Central with the novel intention of publishing every submitted paper which any three of the editorial board members agrees to review, in a process which will be public and non-anonymous.