Meet Ms. Dewey! (She got attitude!)

A search engine that gets impatient, slings elastics at you and is more than a little funny? Well, that's Microsoft's "Ms. Dewey". This is, supposed to be the wave of the future. While it's a nice idea - mixing entertainment with a search engine - it suffers shortcomings in many areas.

Most important is the search engine. It just doesn't give you a thorough search. Actually, you'd get a better search from an i-pod. A lot of attention is payed to Ms. Dewey herself. Her secret identity has been discovered. She is 25 year old actress Janina Gavankar (if you type her name into the search, Ms. Dewey will tell you all about her and it's all true). She is very entertaining; her facial expressions and body language are the best for a bored virtual person. She turns the pages of a magazine like she's about to rip them out, plays with her Game Boy, and so on.

As I said, she is very entertaining and that might be "Ms. Dewey's" demise. I wonder how many people go to the site just for the entertainment and not for the search engine. I've got to admit I spent nearly a half hour "playing" with her. (She's made up of 600 individual little movies). When it comes to making an actual search, Ms. Dewey is not very interactive. She seems to be just so much eye-candy and not very helpful.

Although she's not all she can be, Microsoft has made a step in the right direction. Hopefully, in the near future, they'll come up with something far more interactive with a more powerful search engine. In the meantime, I'll accept Ms. Dewey as entertainment.

"Ms. Dewey, tell me about S&M ..."