This is one of the most interesting ways to do a search that I have ever seen. Ms. Dewey is a Flash-based service that has a real person constantly interjecting comments using decent set of pre-defined responses. It is powered by Windows Live Search but believe me you won’t be using this for your primary search engine since you can only see 3 results at a time. While it is mildly entertaining to see what she does the results are nothing more than what you would receive by performing a search on Live.com.
Her animations also quickly get repetitive and are completely independent of what you’re searching for. You can search for the same phrase twice and it will display different videos of “Ms. Dewey” each time. I found it to be more amusing to see what she does if you don’t perform any searches and just leave her sit there. I think she has about 6 different animations for the “idle state” before they start repeating.
Thanks for the tip Curtiss!
News Source: Digg
Telling her to “f*ck off” brings up some mildly amusing results. If you keep at it she gets stressed and swears a lot.
Also, you can hear the directors in the background!
I tried it a few times and one time she said that “I tried that with 3 close friends once.” Interesting…
i’d hit that.
Nice one, and it does show more than three results, if you scroll. (just hover the bottom/top part of the results windows)
when trying this a few days back when I first saw it, I found it amusing that the only time she “interacted” with the user (input), was when they typed something offensive or otherwise not intended for search purposes. like the examples people have listed such as “f*ck off”
if it is just a search you are performing she won’t interact in any new or original way….however the concept is cool and innovative, I’d like to see them do more with it, when it comes to reaction to user input…creating the illusion of interaction between Ms. Dewey, and the lonely computer geek at the other end
I noticed that it does allow more than three but that is like viewing your search results on a screen the size of a PDA…it just isn’t very good.
I typed “eat shit” and she replied, “There are farm animals that don’t do that kind of thing what makes you think I would.”
Nice. Real nice.
You get a nice response from typing “take off your clothes”.
Ha! I just tried that and if you keep doing searches on it there are a few different responses that she has. One of them involves “buffering.”