Ms Dewey.

October 16, 2006 10:49 PM

Ms Dewey: A is a search engine with a "human" face.I can't understand why anyone would think this is a good idea, but whoever did seems to have spent a lot of money doing it.
posted by delmoi (104 comments total)

Ms. Dewey, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
posted by effugas at 10:56 PM on October 16, 2006 [2 favorites]

I must say, after her Great Grandfather's decimal based system of storing & reference printed materials, this is quite a comedown for the Dewey family name.
posted by jonson at 11:01 PM on October 16, 2006

I am not impressed by her responses to my inquiries. Sass does not make up for functionality, madam.
posted by cortex at 11:01 PM on October 16, 2006

Indeed. The Turing test in reverse.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 11:02 PM on October 16, 2006 [1 favorite]

Boy, that was seriously lame. Thanks for posting it though, delmoi... I'm glad I spent 30 seconds with Ms Dewey, if only to see how pointless the web can truly be.
posted by newfers at 11:02 PM on October 16, 2006

I told her I loved her and she used some kind of weird television metaphor to dis me.
posted by Espy Gillespie at 11:03 PM on October 16, 2006

Ms Dewey is my new favorite pretend internet girlfriend!!!
posted by illuminatus at 11:05 PM on October 16, 2006

A friend of mine told me she won't show you her breasts.
posted by marxchivist at 11:05 PM on October 16, 2006 [1 favorite]

I am surprised at the overwhelmingly negative reaction - at least it is occasionally amusing, as opposed to Ask.Jeeves or whatever, and it has some pretty funny idling segments. Who the heck funded this?
posted by blahblahblah at 11:06 PM on October 16, 2006

Also, I have to give them credit for finding the most pan-ethnic looking woman imaginable - Ms. Dewey is the person of the future.
posted by blahblahblah at 11:08 PM on October 16, 2006 [1 favorite]

The search engine itself is pretty bad and I don't need a 7 second general quip about my search term.
posted by geoff. at 11:09 PM on October 16, 2006

Whoa wait all her comments are sexual. Type in "math" and she makes a lame penis joke. What the hell? Is this 1998 again? This had to cost a bit of money to record all this.
posted by geoff. at 11:11 PM on October 16, 2006

What blahblahblah said. The ethnic ambiguity just screams "marketing"!
posted by chef_boyardee at 11:15 PM on October 16, 2006

There's a lot of video there. There's some background in this Digg thread.
posted by vacapinta at 11:16 PM on October 16, 2006

I asked her why she sucked, and she threatened to turn me over to the Justice Department. A winning strategy for a search engine.
posted by addyct at 11:17 PM on October 16, 2006

Hmm, try searching for "ho".
posted by delmoi at 11:26 PM on October 16, 2006

I feel, however irrationally, that I know the actress who plays Ms. Dewey from college. She looks awfully familiar.

Oh, also, penis.
posted by Sticherbeast at 11:26 PM on October 16, 2006

Nevermind! I was thinking of someone else. Someone who wasn't in both Barbershop and Barbershop 2, playing different roles each time.
posted by Sticherbeast at 11:30 PM on October 16, 2006

I don't know... it seems kind of pointless...
posted by MythMaker at 11:32 PM on October 16, 2006

I don't care how long it takes. I'm going to keep typing until I see her naked.
posted by milkwood at 11:35 PM on October 16, 2006 [1 favorite]

I feel, however irrationally, that I know the actress who plays Ms. Dewey from college. She looks awfully familiar.

Did you go to school with
Janina Gavankar?

(Also, Google image search has a couple of nude shots. Not that I was looking or anything...)
posted by delmoi at 11:37 PM on October 16, 2006

I was looking for a function to use in PHP and she asked me if I had been drinking.
No bitch, I'm working.
Really, if she isn't going to get naked this is worthless.
posted by 2sheets at 11:39 PM on October 16, 2006

On second thought, you know that guy in your office that knows all the lines to caddy shack? He's gonna love this.
posted by 2sheets at 11:41 PM on October 16, 2006

Ms. Dewey is deaf to my pleas of clothing removal.
posted by Krrrlson at 11:46 PM on October 16, 2006

1. Create talking search engine with a human face and attitude.
2. ???
3. I don't even know what the hell is supposed to happen at step 3.
posted by Loudmax at 11:49 PM on October 16, 2006 [1 favorite]

Apart from the search engine, it reminds me of the Subservient Chicken.
posted by owhydididoit at 11:54 PM on October 16, 2006

You know what I like about Google? It doesn't make me feel like the mother of a soon-to-be-pregnant teenage girl who hates me because I've never really tried to understand her friends.
posted by maryh at 11:58 PM on October 16, 2006

I searched for "dinosaur" (which I often do, because Dinosaurs are AWESOME) and she asked if I was just letting my dog type now. Stupid search engine. Of course not. I'm at the office.
posted by brundlefly at 12:01 AM on October 17, 2006

I'm going to keep typing until I see her naked.

Ms. Dewey is deaf to my pleas of clothing removal.

Really, if she isn't going to get naked this is worthless.

Yo, boizone collective, oomph and whoomp.

No problem with a real search engine. This one, of course, worked for shit.

But Ms. D did have a couple special canned responses to my lewd proposals, harkening me back to the good old days of early Sierra games.
posted by dgaicun at 12:05 AM on October 17, 2006

I asked her if she'd have sex with me, but she made fun of my penis size instead. BITCH.
posted by Justinian at 12:15 AM on October 17, 2006

dammit, she won't show me her boobs. I give up.
posted by Justinian at 12:19 AM on October 17, 2006

After hearing EatTheWeak play with this for 10 minutes, I just got reminded of bonzai buddy. I think I hate her.
posted by nadawi at 12:21 AM on October 17, 2006

I typed in dumb search engines and she told me not pirate software, unless it's mapping software because she thinks pirates know a little something about that.
I thought of many pirate jokes but decided not to share them with her because she just wouldn't get them.
posted by Holy foxy moxie batman! at 12:21 AM on October 17, 2006

that's not TO pirate software
posted by Holy foxy moxie batman! at 12:21 AM on October 17, 2006

That bitch crashed my Firefox. Oh, wait, I know a better way to express that: >:0!
posted by booksandlibretti at 12:27 AM on October 17, 2006

"Tell me more about 'what do you look like naked.' " is about all I expected. I wasn't entirely disappointed.
posted by paulsc at 12:31 AM on October 17, 2006

She's no Dr. Sbaitso.
posted by Falconetti at 12:34 AM on October 17, 2006

She kind of intimidates me. And I'm a GIRL.
posted by liquorice at 12:36 AM on October 17, 2006

"Civilization-ending plagues." She asked if I was ok. A Mefi post was the #3 hit.
posted by furiousthought at 12:41 AM on October 17, 2006

So Subservient Chicken, an ex, and Ask Jeeves walk into bar...
posted by ryoshu at 12:44 AM on October 17, 2006

You know what I'm glad about? I'm glad Amanda Congdon didn't get this job. Because Ms. Dewey's shtick is so Rocketboomish that I can completely picture that, and it makes me even sadder.
posted by furiousthought at 12:50 AM on October 17, 2006

I love the smell of burning venture capital money in the morning.
posted by SteveInMaine at 12:53 AM on October 17, 2006 [1 favorite]

Try "one ring". The search won't always give the desired result, but you'll know it when you see it.
posted by mistersix at 1:46 AM on October 17, 2006

You can search on Janina Gavankar for a sassy response.
posted by beerbajay at 1:48 AM on October 17, 2006

You guys are all talking smack now, but just wait until Google buys it for four billion dollars in stock options in 2012 on the premise that jokey pan-ethnic AI constructs are going to shift paradigms and render other stuff obsolete.
posted by The God Complex at 1:48 AM on October 17, 2006

WHOIS leads us to evb.com so it's probably advertising something. Just what that is, I don't know.
posted by alby at 1:52 AM on October 17, 2006

OK, so she actually did all right at the first two I gave her: climate change and Bill Clinton. Then it went to shit. I can still hear her caterwauling in the background, begging for search terms. Imagine if Google was in heat like that.

And anyway delmoi, shouldn't this be in Projects? You ain't fooling anyone!
posted by imperium at 1:52 AM on October 17, 2006

I wonder what the Elevator pitch for this was.
posted by moonbiter at 1:57 AM on October 17, 2006

What is the point?
posted by wsg at 2:07 AM on October 17, 2006

I saw a woman listening to headphones singing "I want to see the gates of hell come crashing down," and then Firefox crashed.

Is this a bad joke? Or just a bad website?
posted by schwong at 2:35 AM on October 17, 2006

It's like having a really bad temp at the reception desk.
posted by pracowity at 2:41 AM on October 17, 2006

Hm. I ask what I think are reasonable questions - like 'who funded msdewey.com?' - and get drama, irrelevant answers and no tangible results, just like at work. How is that for an experience?
At one point she goes off the deep end and is served something in a martini glass. This can't possibly be a search engine for its own sake. Is this some lame viral hoo-ha? It must be. I can't imagine this being for real.
posted by nj_subgenius at 2:43 AM on October 17, 2006

The totally baffling thing is that the thing has no apparant purpose - no way to make money, no links to parent or creative agency company, or even any 'about' information of any kind, and the search results interface is useless. And no information about it at all with any google searches I could come up with. Curiouser and curiouser...

My only guess is it's some sort of research project, to find out how many different combinations of 'pls get naked' people will type when confronted with high-quality unpredictable video of attractive women. Or possibly this is an alpha version of something.

Amusing way to kill 20 minutes though.
posted by MetaMonkey at 2:44 AM on October 17, 2006

Anyone else reminded of Starship Titanic?
posted by MetaMonkey at 2:45 AM on October 17, 2006

oh, and btw
posted by nj_subgenius at 2:46 AM on October 17, 2006

I'm guessing that it's not worth going to a windows machine to view this... damn Flash 8.
posted by handee at 3:28 AM on October 17, 2006

The digg thread has a lot of interesting search responses, and some terms have mutiple responses...

She also has multiple 'intro' videos...

As a search engine interface it, of course, sucks (where is the scrollbar, or anything indicating how to scroll! I found it by accident eventually). As a piece of interactive performance art, well, its OK i guess... As a fun way of wasting a few mins trying to find 'interesting' search terms (eg 'ho': try it a few times), well it works for me :)

On preview, google is oddly blind about her isn't it :) Not even link:www.msdewey.com works!

(Pan ethnic? to me, she was obviously half-white/half-indian -- thats the asian subcontinent, not native American, with a large dose of California!)
posted by nielm at 3:38 AM on October 17, 2006

Metafilter: Haters of my new girlfriend.
posted by ewkpates at 3:39 AM on October 17, 2006

I asked her age (30), whether she's a real woman (her response made reference to Felicity Huffman's oscar nomination) and if that was her natural hair color (she whipped out a large pistol).
posted by PY at 3:39 AM on October 17, 2006

Oh dear...
posted by Effigy2000 at 4:00 AM on October 17, 2006

BTW the actress comments on the site in her DeviantArt journal:

i believe they'd like it to be an enigma, but it's quite simply an über-fun project using the MSN search engine.

posted by nielm at 4:01 AM on October 17, 2006

type 'beer'
posted by IronLizard at 4:19 AM on October 17, 2006

the search results it displays are from msn search.
posted by snofoam at 4:24 AM on October 17, 2006

BTW the actress comments on the site in her DeviantArt journal

Let's start a pool on how long it will take for her to sign up and comment in this thread. Let me be the first to welcome JaninaZ to MetaFilter.
posted by iconomy at 4:30 AM on October 17, 2006

search terms that more or less reliably led to props or activity:

some more active sketches:

explosion/bomb
country
beer/homer simpson
christmas
arcade
music
tv
police
comic
safety
read
video games/Nintendo/kill
rap/ho
robot


some less active sketches:

gun
art
ipod
suicide
phone number
terrorism
danger
s&m/toys
feminism/dog
chase
email
janina gavankar
posted by dgaicun at 4:50 AM on October 17, 2006

Hilarious. It took me three attempts to get Ms Dewey loaded then when I asked my question she drank three shots, told me she couldn't understand me and then accused me of being in the pub all afternoon. Tremble, Google.
posted by Joeforking at 4:51 AM on October 17, 2006

more active: baby
posted by dgaicun at 4:52 AM on October 17, 2006

more active: horn
posted by dgaicun at 4:55 AM on October 17, 2006

more active: rain
posted by dgaicun at 4:57 AM on October 17, 2006

"...an über-fun project using the MSN search engine"

And she's not being ironic, is she?
posted by klausness at 5:01 AM on October 17, 2006

The impatience and haranguing made it way less interesting to me. I tried my two favourite random searches (bats, then monkeys, of course) and the whole "I'm on a timer" routine as I perused the (lackluster, but, then, that's MSN's Search for ya) results made me uninterested in playing around further.

After reading through the comments here, I think a fundamental truth about humanity has once again been resolutely confirmed: The quest for boobies prompts otherwise rational folks to put up with some damned annoying behaviour.
posted by batmonkey at 5:45 AM on October 17, 2006

I hate her. I hate her. I hate her.
posted by sveskemus at 6:08 AM on October 17, 2006

Ms. Dewey crashed my Firefox.
posted by GuyZero at 6:16 AM on October 17, 2006

I'd hit query it.
posted by pardonyou? at 6:30 AM on October 17, 2006

Ha! I was just here looking for additions to my arguments-against-Flash file ... gracias, MeFi!
posted by bhance at 6:36 AM on October 17, 2006

Try "bestiality"
posted by dead_ at 6:52 AM on October 17, 2006

It uses MSN as its search backend.
posted by ph00dz at 6:56 AM on October 17, 2006

Hah. I went out to dinner with the actress (and her boyfriend, to whom I was applying for a job) while she was in town filming this. This is the first I've seen it now that it launched. It's pretty much as she described it, which means not targetted at me or most of mefi. I got the impression that Microsoft was funding it, though I'm not sure if she said that, or if she just said MSN and that's all I remember.

When not asked to play an obnoxious character, given an irritating script, and then cut up and fed through a very stupid AI, she's able to converse in english quite well.

dead_: yeah, it's totally -- Oh! You mean try searching for that?
posted by aubilenon at 6:59 AM on October 17, 2006

posted by mr_crash_davis at 7:31 AM on October 17, 2006 [4 favorites]

This is why women should not be allowed in the workplace.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 7:42 AM on October 17, 2006

Not sure, but I think I heard somewhere that MSN search is involved.
posted by iconomy at 8:08 AM on October 17, 2006

Ms Dewey just tell me: "attention whore"
posted by SonicBoom at 8:42 AM on October 17, 2006

any search engine requiring flash is highly suspect
posted by chibikeandy at 8:59 AM on October 17, 2006

I hate her. I hate her. I hate her.

To clarify: By "her" I mean the Ms. Dewey character, not the actress playing her. I don't know the actress, have never seen her in anything else, and have no beef with her.
posted by sveskemus at 9:02 AM on October 17, 2006

I asked about Oppositional Defiant Disorder and she showed me a rubber chicken. There's something profound about that. (Or is it stupid? I can never get those two straight.)
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:16 AM on October 17, 2006

Whoa she's obnoxious. Her sulkiness is awful.
posted by arcticwoman at 9:39 AM on October 17, 2006

Ms Dewey is reloading...
posted by Navelgazer at 10:33 AM on October 17, 2006

I tried this, but she didn't pull anything from her cootchie.

Am I in the wrong thread?
posted by j-dub at 10:50 AM on October 17, 2006

Hmm, try searching for "ho".

Heh. Best experienced for contrast after a half dozen other searches.
Eh... she's yammering at me now from the other browser. Hold on.
posted by dreamsign at 11:13 AM on October 17, 2006

Whoa whoa whoa, the first hit for "sex" is DOG SEX.
posted by ddf at 11:25 AM on October 17, 2006

Yeah, I want a slowly loading flash app for a search engine. Ms Dewey is loading. Meh.
posted by elwoodwiles at 2:12 PM on October 17, 2006

Ask her what she's reading or if she does anal.

How many of these did she do? Jesus.
posted by elr at 2:38 PM on October 17, 2006

Try "we're all gonna die."
posted by chrominance at 3:07 PM on October 17, 2006

"Do you felch hobos?" wasn't as cool and I had hoped.
posted by Cyrano at 3:46 PM on October 17, 2006

She's sexiest during the loading screen.
posted by Astro Zombie at 4:05 PM on October 17, 2006

she gave me her email address ([e-mail]) but it came back with a fatal error.
posted by Bear at 4:40 PM on October 17, 2006

I tried asking her about her previous co-stars and movies.

"Dark" didn't get the response I expected, but "Cup of my blood" did.
posted by dreamsign at 6:09 PM on October 17, 2006

It gets old in about one second.
posted by chance at 6:30 PM on October 17, 2006

Good gracious, if you ask her about John Ruskin she whips out a copy of Turner's Battle of Trafalgar, does a shit on it, and screams "THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF PAINTING IS DEAD". There's something very wrong about that.
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 6:48 PM on October 17, 2006 [2 favorites]

I asked her serious questions about dying.
She was rather flippant about it.
posted by seanyboy at 12:23 AM on October 18, 2006 [1 favorite]

Okay, worth it for the ho thing.
posted by liquorice at 7:12 AM on October 18, 2006

Ms. Dewey seems to be sending me a lot of web site hits all of a sudden. What's up with that?
posted by Captaintripps at 7:10 PM on October 19, 2006

Also try Janina Gavankar ;)
posted by badlydubbedboy at 2:58 AM on October 20, 2006

"Chuck Norris" yields a couple funny results...I was kinda hoping they would've loaded all of the Chuck Norris facts in there.

Then I would've bought it for 1.65 billion dollars.
posted by Overzealous at 11:33 AM on November 5, 2006