[ZDNet Blogs] If you haven’t seen Ms. Dewey, you will probably be hearing about her. She’s trying to kill the memory of Jeeves, who you formerly asked. She’s also a disaster as far as UI goes.

Built in Flash, Ms. Dewey is an antropomorphized search page that features an actress. Ms. Dewey is only slightly more pleasant than Scuzz the Rat in Microsoft Bob who apparently spent about 20 minutes in front of a green screen making chit-chat that loops as you contemplate your search and the results. She gets impatient, calls "Type something here," taps the screen and asks if anyone is out there, pouts (she’s hot, so she can get away with it like Jeeves never could, a conceit that is sexist on innumerable levels), but mostly proves, as Google Blogoscoped put it, that she—the search interface—is "inhumanly dumb."

Does anyone really think that just because you slap a ‘human’ looking user interface on software that it’ll be more effective or compelling? Are ‘agents‘ really of any value?

Just imagine a world in which Google used clippy - "It looks like you’re trying to search for something. Would you like help?"

Yuck.