Microsoft's bionic comedienne

My brother directed me to Ms. Dewey the other night, a new search engine cooked up by the geeks up at Microsoft.

What makes Ms. Dewey different from the myriad other search engines (past and present) is that she's essentially a stand-up comedienne wrapped around Google. After submitting your query, there's a short quip with accompanying live-motion video before the results are presented.

For example, a self-referrential search of "Ms. Dewey" prompts her to comment, "Every couple of years, we have Dewey family reunions. Or as I like to call them, 'interventions.'"

And if you sit around and don't do anything, she prompts you with "Ask more questions. The more you ask, the more I know. And soon I will rule the world! Muahahahahahahaha!"

Of course, as a creation of Microsoft, she's not above pimping the company's products. She will occasionally listen to music on a Microsoft Zune, and a query related to video games might be prefaced with Ms. Dewey playing an XBox FPS before stashing the controller.

Needless to say, there's a technological price to pay for this entertainment. Unlike the minimalistic Google, all of Ms. Dewey's multimedia fun means you'll need some good bandwidth and a bit of patience -- every search requires a nontrivial amount of waiting for the answers, which aren't notably any different than what you'd get from any other search engine anyway.

And ultimately that's what will doom Ms. Dewey to failure; after the novelty wears off (approximately fifteen minutes or so, enough time to play several rounds of "What search queries can I submit that will trigger a funny response from Ms. Dewey?"), you're left with slower response times and several canned routines that you'll have seen already.

Still, while the gimmick's still fresh, it's worth giving her a visit and playing around a bit.