Why Google Will Get More Hype Than Yahoo Today

First, since you probably havent heard of Yahoos Search Pad, heres what it does:

Lets say you are heading to Austin for the SXSW conference next month. If you were using Yahoos search engine (hint: most SXSWrs havent been on Yahoo in months) it would notice that youre doing a variety of associated searches about Austin. It would save those into a new kind of notebook. Or, if it didnt notice for some reason that youre looking for Austin hotels, Austin BBQ, Austin restaurants, fun things to do in Austin, etc, you could start your own Search Pad and copy and paste Web pages into it.

On the surface of it Yahoos innovation is the kind of thing that would have early adopters like me slobbering all over myself to tell you about.

But Im not. Heres why:

1. When Google released Latitude last night it was available to everyone. I never even heard about Latitude from Google until the press release came into my Gmail account and when I clicked the link to try it out it all worked and I instantly told my friends on friendfeed about it and they all tried it out too and we had a big conversation about it. When Yahoo releases Search Pad today? Its not available to everyone. Only randomly-selected people. I cant force it on. I cant test it. We cant talk about it.

2. When Google released Latitude it might not have been the biggest idea, but it was aimed at a shifting paradigm: mobile phone users. Yahoos Search Pad? Aimed at old school web users. These people are not being forced to change their behaviors, so will be tougher to convince to try anything new. Lets face it, if you get a new iPhone, you are going to try a TON of new things compared to the web. Thats a paradigm shift and hype comes with things that latch onto paradigm shifts.

3. When Google releases things it usually has some goodies for alpha geeks. Theres usually an API, or an advanced feature or two that only people who read Stack Overflow, Scripting News, or Life Hacker can appreciate. Yahoos announcement this morning? No such thing. Googles announcement? Has tons of language that appeals to early adopters. When I interviewed Yahoos Tom Che, Senior Director of Product Management yesterday he admitted they were going after everyday users with Search Pad. When I asked him if I could bundle up a bunch of things in a Search Pad and forward them to Twitter, the answer was no. When I asked him if I could get a URL to the Search Pad, the answer was no. When I asked him if I could share a Search Pad with my friends, the answer was no. When I asked him if it would work with Googles search engine (sorry, most of us wont switch to Yahoo) the answer was not really. (You can manually enter things into a Yahoo Search Pad that youve found on Google, but it wont automatically build a Search Pad for you the way it would if you were over on Yahoos search engine).

So, excuse me if, when you see me doing interviews today in San Francisco (I have a ton of them), I am much more excited about Googles future than Yahoos future. Yahoo doesnt get it: to get its stock price to go up and to get people like me to get excited about its future they need to care about early adopters. Its clear they dont care, so why should I?

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