Microsoft's Tafiti: A Silverlight based tool powered by Live Search

Microsoft’s latest experimental release Tafiti is an eye catching, interesting and innovative search tool built on top of Windows Live Search and Silverlight.

Tafiti, which means "do research" in Swahili(a sub-Saharan language), enhances searching on the web by allowing users to search, save, e-mail results across multiple queries and sessions.

Tafiti is based on Release Candidate (RC) of the Silverlight 1.0 browser plug-in and it runs everywhere Silverlight does i.e. On Vista, XP SP2 running IE 6, IE 7, Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.8 and Firefox 2.0.x; and on Mac OS X using Firefox 1.5.0.8 and Firefox 2.0.x

All you need to have is a pre-release version of Silverlight installed which comes free as of now.

My initial experience with Tafiti revealed these facts:

• Search results can be dragged from the results pane to a shelf, be labeled and stacked upon.The stack content can be edited, saved or e-mailed to someone else.

• There is a Tree View where by search results are placed on the branches of a tree which can be rotated and zoomed as necessary to visualize the search results.

• Tafiti includes a carousel to simplify the organization of returned search results. By rotating the carousel, one can access search results from the web, images, news, RSS feeds, or books.

• One major hitch in the tool is, one can’t right click the links to open in a new tab.

For the ones who’s looking for a simple search, may be a text based search such as, Google, Yahoo will serve the purpose but if you want to experience the Search then surely Tafiti has something new to offer you.

It’s just designed to show off the kinds of apps developers can build using Silverlight.

Watch a Video to know more about Tafiti.