Weekend activity: Have Fun with Ms. Dewey

You can say a lot about Ms. Dewey the Flash interface that Microsoft has put up to promote its Live Search web site.

It might be tacky, completely useless for a search engine, they could have chosen a different girl, a complete waste of time. It’s fun - maybe not for longer than a few minutes - but it is and that’s why we write about it, particularly if you can have her say or do something with the right search terms. And yes we know its viral marketing.

So there you have a beautiful actress who flirts with you, teases you and comments on any search term you enter as a user interface. And with the right search you can let her say something funny or play some gigs.

So we went along and collected a list of words that get what we are looking for here - entertainment not search results:

To begin with a few tips. The same search term does not always result in the same action. So you might have to search a few times with the same word(s). If you ask the same term too frequently you might have her say something like “… the world loneliest man” or “…are you just letting your dog type…”. Then just use another term. The engine behind the “girl” is not too clever and it groups terms into categories - as it occurred to us that this is the way how some answers are chosen e.g. for film titles etc. Anyway we had no intention to dig deeper.

Search terms that we consider best (in groups):
gun - jail - email - King Kong - credit cards - weather forecast, Storm, snowing - beer

Other words that return small movies (in groups):
Ho, yo mama, eminem - where do babies come from, pills – clothes - games, Nintendo or other computer game terms (Halo 2, Video games) - Arcade – Comic – Read – Book - TV – how to fight a ninja - music - how to do the robot - Janina Gavankar – Art, design, Web design - murder, forensics, police - Congress, Bush, Cheney - Condoms - Safety, danger - Dog - Toys, cats - suicide - dead - iPod - Microsoft, Live Search, Google - Gmail, Explosion, how to create a bomb - Romania - how to run - Who are you - your age – Country - Lord of the Ring, one ring - Christmas – Ricardo – UFOs

adult terms will start a teaser where she opens a button and that’s it

Note: the image at the beginning of this post is from the movie “Time Machine” and shows “Vox the librarian hologram” that might have been the model for Ms. Dewey