Ms. Dewey

» see msdewey.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The search box had a woman standing next to it, and she was the reason you were there. Ms. Dewey stood in a dark room with a city behind her that changed depending on the time of day where you sat. You typed a word, she said something about the word out loud, and the results arrived in a thin column off to the side where they were obviously not the point.

Microsoft put it online in October 2006 as a Flash front end sitting on Live Search. The woman was Janina Gavankar, and the entire performance was six hundred video clips recorded across three days: canned reactions to whole categories of query, plus idle behavior for when you stopped typing. Leave her waiting long enough and she got audibly annoyed with you.

It was not built the way a Microsoft product gets built. McCann Erickson's San Francisco office ran it and EVB handled production alongside Sausage Films. Microsoft never gave it a product page or a launch announcement, and never listed it beside Live Search as a thing Live Search had. It went up quietly and was left to spread by itself, which people at the time called viral and which in practice meant nobody had to own it.

Live Search had no argument to make in Turkey. Google was search here in 2006 and there was no contest running that anyone needed to be recruited into, so a campaign built to get Americans to try a different box had no reason to be shown to anybody in Ankara. Ms. Dewey reached me the way a regional television spot reaches you, which is to say secondhand and years later, as a thing that happened inside somebody else's media budget. The distance in this grave is an ad buy rather than a language or a connection speed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ three days of shooting ~

Six hundred usable clips in three days is roughly one every couple of minutes of a working day, which tells you exactly what kind of shoot it was. One set, one performer, one list to get through. Everything Ms. Dewey ever said was already recorded before you arrived, matched to your query by keyword, and the illusion of a person paying attention to you held only as long as what you typed landed near a bucket somebody had thought of in advance.

Type something outside those buckets and she fell back on a general line about you being interesting or boring, which was the moment the machinery showed. People spent a lot of time in 2006 and 2007 hunting for the queries that produced the good clips, and posting the list. The site was more fun to break than to use, and breaking it was most of what the traffic was doing.

~ the campaign that would not say it was one ~

Microsoft's refusal to claim Ms. Dewey is the strangest part of the record. No product manager was ever quoted about it, and it had no place in the Live Search documentation. The company paid an agency to build a search interface and hire an actress to front it, then stood a careful step back from the result so it could be an experiment if it worked and nothing at all if it did not.

The result is a small piece of unfairness that still holds. Clippy was a shipped feature of a shipped product, so twenty five years of people have blamed Microsoft for Clippy by name. Ms. Dewey was an advertisement, so it gets remembered fondly by the same internet, and by more people than remember Live Search itself. Being disowned turned out to be good for its reputation.

~ what the domain served next ~

The archive dates the end more precisely than any article does. The last capture of the real page is 26 December 2008, and the front end was always a small HTML shell around a Flash object, under two kilobytes for its entire life. On 16 January 2009 the same address answered with something completely different: a Silverlight application titled Microsoft Brand Voice, carrying a footer that read Microsoft Confidential and FOR MICROSOFT INTERNAL USE ONLY. The flirting search engine had become an internal brand guidelines deck, built in Microsoft's answer to the plug-in it used to run on.

By April 2009 msdewey.com had moved again, this time to EVB's own agency site, whose front page ran a Flash cityscape of its own. Live Search became Bing five months after Ms. Dewey stopped answering. The domain today is a parked lander that bounces you to an ad page, which for a project that was an advertisement all along is at least consistent.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »