No, I haven’t quite drunk the koolade yet here at Yahoo.

But I’m starting to get a better appreciation of the reality verses the mystique of Google and of Yahoo and of other search engines.

Basically it boils down to this: in the group I’m in, we sell advertising. Perhaps 25 years ago when I first got on the ‘net, the notion of advertising would be a bad thing. But today, when you get right down to it, we use the ‘net for shopping and searching for things to buy–which means that advertising is a natural extension of what we do. If I type in “dvd players” into a search engine, I may be looking for a dvd player to buy; perfect opportunity for Circuit City to remind me that they’re just down the street.

Now Google makes a ton of money. They make a ton of money because they have successfully driven a ton of traffic to their site. Google is comfortable with allowing their trademark to become a verb: we don’t ‘search’ the ‘net, we ‘google’ the net.

And they’ve made a ton of money by, well, by creating a mystique around how brilliant they are: Google has spent a lot of time talking about how brilliant their search is, how brilliant their developers are, and how brilliant their company is. And yes, at the time Google Maps was a brilliant early example of the power of AJAX.

But–I hate to say this, but search is a solved problem. Google didn’t invent search; why people flocked to Google was because it was a simple and easy and unobtrusive search engine. The ‘brilliant’ part came about later as Google spent a ton of time talking about search strategies–but every company uses different scoring techniques to score search results. Google happens to be much better at detecting certain technical terms: “web.xml” searches for the literal seven character string, while Yahoo breaks the term into “web” and “xml”, which gives completely different results. And Google happens to “hide” a bunch of goodies into their search interface–which is less about being “brilliant” and more about being “useable.”

In other words, Google has conflated “brilliant” and “useable.” And that creates the illusion that any portal is somehow “primitive.” Further, by leveraging this sort of “hidden” functionality, it causes people to learn how to use Google–and it creates a sort of psychological lock-in: if I need to add five numbers together, I can just pop up Google.

But this isn’t really all that “brilliant”, is it?

The people I’m meeting here at Yahoo are brilliant. Once you get past the fact that Yahoo’s home page is a portal–and I hate portals, I’ll readily admit–you find that Yahoo maps are pretty cool, Yahoo mail beats Google mail, aside from the fact that you are welcomed by a damned ad, and Yahoo Groups has a lot more functionality than Google Groups. (Google Groups suffers from being too simple: a good interface should be simple, but not too simple.)

I’m not saying that Yahoo is better than Google–what I’m saying is that the illusion of Google’s fundamental brilliance is just that: an illusion. Web technologies by Yahoo or Google or MSN or Ask.com are far more sophisticated than the typical small-shop web store tech done by someone with a basic shopping cart–and it is far more sophisticated than this web site’s Wiki and Blog.

But it isn’t a hell of a lot more sophisticated than desktop programming. In fact, I’d suggest that, while as sophsticated as our advertising network back-end (Panama) is, what makes it hard is keeping the components simple so we can quickly react to new frauds. There are certainly fewer moving parts in Panama than in Photoshop, for example.

This is an interesting business. But look to me putting a multi-threaded B-tree implementation in Java up on the Wiki in the next month or so–because while the business is interesting, it’s not all that technologically interesting.

I’d love to see someone write a book on the “trial and error” company. Because that’s what most web companies really are: once they get a web application up on the web and start attracting customers, they can quickly use the statistics they gather as to how users reach their site and how they use their site to make adjustments quickly to make the customers happy.

Of course in a sense all companies are trial-and-error companies. Unfortunately most non-web based companies use customer support as the primary source of feedback from their customers, but rather than consider customer support part of the development process or part of the feedback process, companies seem to treat customer support as a necessary evil, as a cost center to shut the customers up.

Today I tried a dry run, testing out my new bicycle to ride into Yahoo Burbank. I also equipped it with a Garmin eTrex Vista CX GPS on a bike handlebar mount, so I can figure out which side streets to take and know my altitutde and speed.

Six miles, and when I got to Yahoo, I was beat to hell–I know I’m out of shape, I’m not that out of shape… But the Garmin told the story: the first mile was a 350 foot drop in altitude, which I knew about. But the last four miles and change was a steady 400 foot climb–which means that while the ground seems somewhat flat, I was working for those four and a half miles. I wasn’t just coasting along supplying energy to beat wind resistance.

Lesson of the day: I’m going to have to take a change of clothes so I can shower when I get to Yahoo–at least until I get into good enough shape that bike riding six miles is a no-brainer.

(Yes, I know; there was no programming content. So to compensate, I give you the Yahoo Developer Center on JavaScript, along with the best book I’ve encountered so far on AJAX: Ajax Hacks from O’Reilly.)

From Daring Fireball:

Apple is the one and only PC maker that sees the first-run experience as an opportunity to make you happy, rather than as an opportunity to make a few bucks by showing you ads and stuffing trialware down your throat.

How true.

Advertisers know about this. They know that when you sell something to someone–even something that won’t be replaced often, like a car–that they need to continue to advertise to you. It’s a halo effect: ads for BMW are targeted to BMW drivers to make them happy they bought a BMW, so they are more likely to recommend BMW, and so they are more likely to replace their older BMWs with a newer BMW. It’s called customer loyalty, and its built first and foremost by taking every opportunity you can to make the customer happy.

Computer manufacturers, however, don’t seem to remember this basic law of advertising, a law that was probably discovered by the Romans–if not by caveman. And so they abuse the hell out of you on the first boot, exchanging short-term gain of collecting a few bucks from advertisers for the happiness of their customers in making a multi-hundred or multi-thousand dollar purchase. The assumption is that happiness isn’t as important as making a few bucks.

But Apple has figured out this basic law of Happiness. So much so that when I first unboxed my Apple TV, I carefully took it out of the box, plugged it into the TV, configured the TV, used a flashlight to triple-check to make sure the TV was properly hooked up and the tuner was switched to the correct channel–all so I could make sure that the moment I plugged the Apple TV into the wall, full video and audio would work correctly from the millisecond power was appled.

Because I didn’t know what the Apple TV box would do when it was first turned on–but I knew that it would make me happy, and I didn’t want to miss a second of it.

The checking of the wires and verifying the component video and audio was correctly synced was well rewarded: when I plugged the Apple TV in, it made me happy.

And it is the same with the iPhone: I don’t know what the unboxing and first-run experience will be like–but I know it will make me happy. My present to my wife when I first get her an iPhone will be to leave it in the box, so she can also experience the same joy–a joy which is so rare when unboxing electronics that she so far has refused to unbox anything. Because she has learned, thanks to years of training, that unboxing and opening up a new gadget is not like christmas, but more like opening up the sealed container that has been living in the back of your refrigerator for the past year or so. You don’t know what to expect, but you know it will take work before you like it.

On coding, from The Old New Thing: Code is read much more often than it is written, so plan accordingly.

I have a bachelors of science degree from the California Institute of Technology.

Now one of the abbreviations for degree and major that I got used to was to write something like “BS/?”, where “?” is replaced with the abbreviation for your degree. So for example “BS/E&AS” means Bachelors of Science, Engineering and Applied Sciences. “BS/CE” means “Bachelors of Science, Chemical Engineering.” And “BS/AP”, Bachelors of Science, Applied Physics.

I have a BS in Mathematics. And when I applied for a new job at a company just spitting distance from me, I was in a hurry, so I scribbled down “BS/MA”: Bachelors of Science, Mathematics. My resume has it, but in the long form “B.Sc. Mathematics”; the on-line application I checked “four-year degree”–I’ve been very clear everywhere what I have–and during the interview everyone interviewed me from my (correct) resume, which they didn’t even bother to look at, since I graduated nearly 20 years ago.

I got a call last night from a field check company which wanted to verify an error on my application. They told me flatly that I did not have a Masters of Arts degree from Caltech; do I have an explanation? And so now what was a shoe-in job becomes a living nightmare as I get a quick course in security and application verification and the people who do it at Yahoo.

Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn…

Update: It appears not to have made a difference, which is as I thought it should. I’ve got my offer, which means I’ll be doing a lot more Java in the future–and will have plenty of Java idiosyncrocies to complain about in the future!