Tafiti is a new front-end for Microsoft’s search engine Live. It’s not an entirely new way of searching, but a new way of presenting the results from your searches. Tafiti is built around Microsoft’s “flash-killer” Silverlight and is meant to show off some of the possibilities you have with Silverlight. Tafiti presents a couple of interesting features, such as the shelf, where can store your searches until later, and a Tree View. The latter is simply a tree-based virtualization of your search results. You can see how far from the original query your results are. It also has the results divided into categories, such as news, RSS, books, web and pictures.
While we certainly feel that Tafiti (means “do research” in Swahili) is fresh, it’s still Microsoft’s Live search engine underneath.
Unfortunately Silverlight is only available for Windows and Mac at the moment, but the Moonlight project by Mono will hopefully bring Silverlight features to linux as well.
