First Annual Google Programming Contest
In celebration of more than three years of delivering the best search experience on the Internet, Google is sponsoring the first annual Google Programming Contest.

Grand Prize

$10,000 in cash
VIP visit to Google Inc. in Mountain View, California
Potentially run your prize-winning code on Google’s multi-billion document repository (circumstances permitting)
The Challenge

Google is providing a selection of about 900,000 web pages in pre-parsed and raw format, together with a „ripper” program that provides a framework for processing the pre-parsed data. Your mission is to write a program (most likely by adding code to the ripper) that does something interesting with the data, in such a way that it would scale to a web-sized collection of documents. Part of your job is to convince us of why your program is interesting and why it will scale; other than that, you’re free to implement whatever strikes your fancy.

http://www.google.com/programming-contest/