There’s a new search engine on the block. Nothing that exciting in that. But this search engine is the talk of technorati, and anyone who’s anyone in the blogging community has written about it, This search engine is called Ms Dewey, and she’s a girl.
It’s a really weird concept actually – this Ms Dewey is an attractive 20-something woman who acts in a manner vaguely reminiscent of Nanny. Telling you off for mispelt words, chastising you for not getting on with things – it’s all very strange. It takes a while to notice it, but her comments are almost entirely random. Saying that, she’s obviously been pre-programmed with a few key responses. For instance, when you type ‘iPod’ she references mugging and white headphones. There’s a clue here to the origins of this search engine. Design wise, the search results are difficult to see, and there’s an animation you go through before you get to the actual search engine capabilities.
The interesting thing about this is that this actually an experiment from Microsoft, and specifically with their Windows Live initiative. To give them credit, it’s not branded in any way, and there’s no ‘about this site’ evidence on the site itself. They really have just let it loose on the web – with varied response. It seems there is a proportion of the male population that can stand the slow set up, the difficult interface and the sarky comments, but there aren’t many happy faces with the rest of us. It seems Google has nothing to worry about – yet.
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