Scott Adams has made a few jokes about web development technologies recently, and I appreciate them all. He does a good job of capturing the oddity of this business and gets a chuckle out of me every time.

He has, however, never done it as well as this. Although the third panel ruins the joke, the simplicity of it is brilliant and brings into sharp relief how critical it is to have some context, otherwise you end up getting the wrong picture completely. I’d be lying if I were to say that I’ve been at meetings where my sales team said something like this to a client, but it’s within the imaginable realm that somewhere there’s a guy saying this to his customer.

I remember when I was just getting started in web development and I was researching how to get web sites listed in Yahoo. At the time, Yahoo didn’t use web crawlers to decide what sites to list in their search engine; you had to submit it in the category that you wanted your site listed, and a human would review it and decide whether or not to list your site. I don’t know if it still works that way or not, but it’s almost inconceivable that it still would.

I remember at the time, I called someone at Yahoo to ask about the process, and the guy at the other end went into a long story about the elaborate logarithms Yahoo used to determine search results and their listing order. Obviously, what this imbecile meant was “algorithm”.  Unfortunately for him, the words you use are more important than the words you mean, so this poor guy got written off as the dude who told me Yahoo will only return the natural log of the results of your search. Lucky for me, I always happen to be looking for a bijection of the set of positive real search results to the set of all real results so it doesn’t get in my way, but it does explain why Yahoo is less popular than Google.