Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Ms. Dewey can't get the 'Johnny' out of Knoxville Shhh! Ms.Dewey is kinda slow. Jack Lail has been Talking with Ms. Dewey, the first search engine I've seen that makes constant eye contact and whacks the desk with a riding crop when she gets impatient. Says Jack, I searched for Knoxville, Ms. Dewey says: "It's amazing how much people get paid to do stupid things." An apparent reference to Johnny Knoxville. [Random Mumblings] I tried to filter out Johnny by adding "-Johnny" to the search, but she still had some "Jackass" (the movie) comment. The actor may have been filtered out of the list of hits, but there was no easy way to search the list or cut and paste the hits for further inspection. (Limiting a search that way does work in Google.) Instead of removing "Johnny," I added "Tennessee" to the search. Ms. Dewey caught that as a reference to "the South," and lectured me on the correct plural of "y'all" being "all y'all." Cute. But why, when I searched for Peter and Lou Berryman, did Ms. Dewey produce a wooden mallet and say, "here's an idea... naked croquet." Just a coincidence? Or did she know that two of the Wisconsin folksingers' not-quite-hits were "Wasteland Croquet" and "Naked and Nude." I vote for coincidence. A quick search (with Ms. Dewey herself, or with Google) reveals that she" is a viral marketing campaign for a certain Google alternative. It also identifies the actress who recorded all those pouts, poses and snarky comebacks. (Her website mentions her starring in "Microsoft[base ']s cutting edge interactive search engine.") First reaction: Beyond Ms. Dewey's smiling face and invitations to waste time, "her" search results screen is small, low in contrast, hard to read and slow -- the last, perhaps, being the price of popularity... or of Microsoft's using Macromedia's Flash for the interface? From the blog comments, it seems that some visitors haven't figured out how to scroll the Flash-embedded list of search "hits" without a scroll bar. On the other hand, she's more realistic than Lillian the on-line librarian... or the now-departed butler from "AskJeeves" at http://ask.com. A few of her smart-aleck remarks remind me of the Macintosh Talking Moose of the mid-1980s. And she could account for as much a drop in (male) office productivity as the introduction of the Windows Solitaire game. Other reactions: Mitch Ratcliffe says Ms. Dewey is taking cute too far. Metafilter comments: "I can't understand why anyone would think this is a good idea" and "This is quite a comedown for the Dewey family name." But Laughing Librarian says the site has "Searchonality." Personally, I just hope Microsoft doesn't have a search-guy waiting in the wings, or at least that they don't call him Bob, again. 1:24:23 PM

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