Ms Dewey, Reviewed by Cartoonist Jeff Swenson

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MS. DEWEY: A Search Engine With Personality
Reviewed by Cartoonist Jeff Swenson

It's a nice novelty but how long before people turn on the sexy gal hosting the search listings?

I found out about the newest hype while nosing around Alexa.com and figured it was worth checking out why everyone else was rushing to see Ms. Dewey at MsDewey.com.

The concept is not new, but done well. Ms. Dewey is a search engine host, a rather sexy one at that. She welcomes you and then reacts to the words you type in for your search. If you type in "cute" or "sexy" she reacts as if you said it to her. If you type in "fuck you" she might reprimand you or give a nod to Howard Stern's uncensored show. It's different each time unless she runs out of lines and starts repeating herself. Though her extended vocabulary is impressive.

Where this concept came from oddly enough is the adult game market. Okay, it might existed in some form or another before that. I remember playing some of the earliest computer games like the original Police Quest that involved typing in text to interact with characters but that was with simple animation. It was the adult game market that started filming starlets doing stripteases and X-rated acts that you could see if you could only type in the right word or phrase. Thousands upon thousands of guys were busy trying to figure out how to get some blonde in a game to flash her boobs or touch her naughty parts.

Ms. Dewey builds upon the success of that formula by combining it with a search engine. Type in a search for "cat" and she'll react, whether it's a specific reaction or a general reaction depends on how many filmed scenes the producers have been able to dump into their program.

And that's the only problem I see here. I enjoyed trying out Ms. Dewey (achem), but as far as a search engine I don't think I would use it for research. Google is much more qualified for that as well as you can get targeted ads on the side and you have the options of searching through images, newsgroups, videos and more. The main issue with doing a specific search is you don't want to be bothered. Ms. Dewey likes to talk, and she will bother you by tapping on your monitor glass (I thought I had a flat screen?) or talking about something unrelated to your reading. This can become annoying. I tried typing in "Shut Up" to see what would happen: all I got was a quote about keeping your mouth shut because if you opened it you might reveal you were stupid.

Ultimately, because it is a novelty approach to searching I think the idea will wear thin on heavy users of search engines. Most likely Ms. Dewey can do fairly well with surfers who are goofing off or looking for games or want to try see how much stuff Ms. Dewey can say--but this too can get boring after awhile. There might be potential for this idea if the creators expand the idea by creating reading rooms to get away from Ms. Dewey during advanced searches or using Ms. Dewey for video searches, or having Ms. Dewey give the weather, etc so I'm not dismissing the idea. I'm merely pointing out that a novelty doesn't have a long shelf-life and that to sustain a business model (there's no advertising as of yet) Ms. Dewey is going to have to expand the idea for serious users of search engines as well as goof-offs.

Lastly, there needs to be a word that gets Ms. Dewey to flash us or causes her to strip. Otherwise she's just a tease, and that sums up this search engine perfectly.

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