Meet Ms. Dewey, the New Face of MSN

Ms. Dewey may be an avatar, but she is beautiful, witty and a little quirky. She’s the eye-pleasing front end of a new search interface from MSN.

by Helen Leggatt

She’s not just a pretty face, she’s the new promotional weapon MSN have developed to grab some of Google’s search market share. With its “send to a friend” function Ms. Dewey could be the next viral marketing buzz.

Type in your search term and Ms. Dewey will comment on your search whilst the search results are displayed beside her. Some search terms prompt an interesting response! If you don't use the site for a while but keep it open in your browser she will prompt you, in a variety of ways, to resume searching. The whole experience requires the sound to be on.

According to Adweek, Google commanded 45% of U.S. searches in September, whereas MSN only managed 12%, despite spending 40 times more on advertising than Google’s $500,000. In addition, MSN’s search query figure remained constant for the year, Google’s rose 57%.

The second quarter of 2006 saw 19.9 billion searches conducted online, up 12 percent from Q1 (17.7 billion searches), and up 30 percent from Q2 of last year (15.3 billion searches), reports ComScore.