Last week after Microsoft had released the Windows Phone 8.1 update there was a lot of buzz around Cortana, Windows Phone’s brandnew personal digital assistant. People found out Cortana had all kinds of funny responses to questions they asked her. But one of them was special. It turned out Cortana had an easter egg that triggered the return of the infamous Clippy. If you asked Cortana “Do you like Clippy?”, an animated Clippy would show up instead of the usual Cortana logo.

I wondered how this Clippy easter egg was triggered. So I fired up Fiddler and set it up so I could spy on my Windows Phone’s HTTP communication. It turned out that when you ask Cortana that question about Clippy, she will initiate a HTTP request to Bing’s servers. Bing responds with a bunch of HTML that seems to consist of two parts. One part is some…