Angry in the Great White North

Ms Dewey is a front end for the Live Search -- Microsoft's answer to Google. Ms Dewey is a...well...it's hard to explain. Part stand-up comic, part tour guide, with a hint dominatrix.

Just go and use the Ms Dewey front-end yourself and then come back.

Three things to remember:

• A web search is a step in the process of getting information. It is not the end of the process. As a step it needs to be fast and efficient. Any layer of gloss had better add real value (that is, improve my search results) or else it is just a drag on my efficiency. In the time it takes for Ms Dewey to complete her bit that plays after I initiate a search, I would have already evaluated the Google SERP and would have already reached my first site to check out.
• Remember the interface model. When you don't type anything, Ms Dewey taps on your screen or performs other bits to remind you to type something in. That breaks the GUI contract. A GUI is driven by events. Window controls lie inert until you click on a button or pull a scroll bar, or until some external event occurs, like a new mail message is detected. A web app like a search engine ought to similarly wait patiently until I call on it to do something by clicking the Search button.
• Even if you think the Ms Dewey interface is cute, the best front end won't matter if the search engine is lousy. I typed "average vocabulary size" because my daughter had asked me last week how many words I knew. I assured her it wasn't a million-billion, but at the time Googled for the right answer (in the range of 20,000). See what would have happened if I had been using Ms Dewey at that time instead. My daughter would have been treated to some bit about strip poker followed by search results starting with average penis size. Clearly the Ms Dewey responses are driven by the top results returned by the search engine. That MS Live Search thinks that I'm really concerned about my penis when I asked a question about vocabulary reduces what little value-add Ms Dewey has to zero.

Microsoft launched Ms Dewey in October 2006, but is not marketing it. It is depending on word-of-mouth and media coverage to pull in users. Fine, but if Microsoft wants to keep users coming back, they ought to get back to work on getting the search engine right.

Users aren't stupid. A user will be annoyed if a product or service fails to perform very well. A user will leave and never come back if it looks like the company offering the product or service doesn't care much about how badly it performs.