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Q: Is a popular site like www.google.com served up by one computer? In basic networking, we talk about DNS servers, that they resolve human readable addresses (www.google.com) into an actual IP address. As far as I understand, at least using the basics, an IP address refers to a single device (say a router). Surely, www.google.com cannot be served up by one computer? How is www.google.com distributed across multiple servers?

A: The simple answer is, its not.
First off, google is not servers by one IP address.  For me, when looking at Googles domain:

$ nslookup
> www.google.com
Server:     192.168.1.254
Address:    192.168.1.254#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:   www.google.com
Address: 173.194.46.52
Name:   www.google.com
Address: 173.194.46.48
Name:   www.google.com
Address: 173.194.46.49
Name:   www.google.com
Address: 173.194.46.50
Name:   www.google.com
Address: 173.194.46.51

It is served by one of those 5 different IP addresses... for me.  However, tossing www.google.com into an online nslookup tool gives me:

173.194.115.115
173.194.115.112
173.194.115.116
173.194.115.113
173.194.115.114

For you, it could be different.
Google wants to serve its data to me as fast as it can.  So, instead of having me contact a machine in Mountain view, California I am instead contacting a machine that is somewhere closer to me (probably Chicago or Minneapolis for me).
That particular style of dns is known as round robin dns and gives me one of those addresses.  Behind the address there is likely another pool of machines behind another load balancer.  The load balancer is a machine (or set of machines) that takes individual queries and then sends to to another machine (or set of machines) that is least busy.
That said, theres still more machines behind that.  From Computer Weekly, an article from 2009: Single Google search uses 1,000 servers.  Im not sure if that is still accurate but it gives you an idea that there is not a single computer behind the search.
You may also find Inside Search a useful bit to read - there is lots that can be said about search and how it works.  This Google Talk is a set of slides that is also a good bit to read.

user
The text includes one hundred and eighty "e"s in total.
assistant