Since ask.com retired Jeeves (site hat tip, Christy), it now looks like Microsoft decided to step it up a notch with their new promotional search engine, Ms. Dewey.
It’s gotten a bit of attention so far. Functionally, it won’t be replacing anything, but we’ll see how much buzz it generates for Windows Live.
For user experience, it’s part comedic, part provocative, and part sarcastic. There are a number of canned responses depending on what you search for, and some of them are hilarious.
The responses can vary, but really funny ones can come from one-word searches like:
- police
- accident
- nhl
- soccer
- reno
- halloween
- cigarette
- …almost any sport name
I suppose I can start checking out ChaCha Search if I’m looking for human interaction, but it’s pretty fun to see a viral campaign like an effort to integrate video with search.
1 response so far ↓
Chris Dohman // Oct 31, 2006 at 10:39 am
it’s worth a minute of entertainment but too much of an irritating nuisance to actually use it for search.
i searched for “seo” and got a “we are not allowed to talk about that” comment . mildly amusing for a serious engine but could have done much better for an experiment like this.
i wonder what live search can take from an experiment like this? the only thing it shows us is how limited ms. deweys replies are. is that a reflection on live’s search results…
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