I don't know what that guy is smoking, but I wish he would share. All the load average is the depth of the kernel's "runnable" queue - the processes which are able to be run. When a process is waiting for CPU resources, it's put on the runnable queue. When a process unblocks from I/O, it gets put on the runnable queue. When a process wakes up from a sempahore block, it gets put on the runnable queue. Maybe your load is just due to a lot of i/o and not CPU at all? The idea that a load average of one implies perfect CPU utilization is ludicrous. I personally have seen monoprocessor machines running with loads of 2 and above and still have idle CPU available.
Also, his talk of priorities is off base. Unless the sysadmin / machine configurator takes special steps to make sure that the webserver program (or this "search" he's talking about) runs at higher priority. By default, all unix processess run at the same priority (or 'nice level'), so in this example the web pages being served will have the same opportunities for CPU time as the "search".
