Let me introduce you.. this is apparently 'Ms Dewey' and she's the front end of a search engine with results being pulled from Microsoft. Pandia says that it's the creation of the Evolution Bureau company, and who am I to argue. It's really all rather odd. Clicking on her name will take you to the website in question, where she stands there smiling and flicking the 'loading' bar along with her finger. You are then introduced to her doing various different things - the first time I visited she was sharpening a knife, the second time fixing a motorbike. Which just goes to show that librarians can do anything, but of course we already knew that.
However, we then go on to try and ask something. I of course started with a search for me - ever the egotist. She picked up a book, from which I could just make out that it was about the rules of baseball, and started to read from it. This is actually very clever, since one of the phil bradleys out there is a baseball player. I was however a bit startled when she read out some of the rules that didn't mean to make much sense and then said something to the effect of 'And what the f*** does that mean?' - although the word was bleeped out it's pretty obvious that's what she said. I've never had a librarian swear at me before - it was a rather strange experience.
Anyway, I was then presented with a list of results on the right hand side of the screen (as pulled from Live.com). It was quite difficult to read them, and very difficult to scroll up and down - since there was no scroll bar it's necessary to position the cursor above or below the results and move the mouse, making sure the results don't move too quickly for you.
If you take too long 'Ms Dewey' gets out her mobile phone and starts talking, or she'll stand there and read a magazine (as per my picture), or she'll tap on the screen and berate you for not being quicker.
When you run a search it takes a few seconds (at least) for the answers to come up. In the meantime, she keeps the searcher occupied while making some actions or saying something 'witty'. Some of the things that she does are interesting, depending on the search string entered. I've had her turning around and showing me her hands tied behind her back (and no, I didn't do a search for bondage or similar!!) and doing various other things vaguely associated with the search in question. I had her making comments about the President, another saying 'someone isn't taking their medication' when I ran a risque search. 'I'll see your lollipop and raise you a rubber chicken' for a search on the word 'chicken' and so on. Fun for a while, but the amusement value doesn't last too long, and I didn't particularly find the rude responses that funny at the best of times.
In common with the Pandia report I found this very slow to load and to run a search. I suspect that it's just a librarian orientated Subservient Chicken viral with little substance other than to get us to write about it. It's certainly no use as a search engine, but then I don't really think that it's expected to be. The only people using it will do so in order to see how many different responses they'll get for various search terms (swear word terms get 'booooooring' as a come back), bloggers who are going to write about it, and librarians who want to see how they're being presented now.
All the details here at the Guardian's Technology Blog
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/archives/2006/10/19/a_sexy_search_engine_sort_of.html
"The lovely and talented Ms Dewey is a singer and actress, Janina Gavankar with a minimalist Web site at http://www.janinamusic.com/. As Janina Ziona, she hosted the Sony PlayStation E3 Party 2006. Which just goes to show what a very small world it is."
Posted by: Bill Lee | October 24, 2006 at 12:23 AM