Tafiti Search Engine

Microsoft released an experimental interface for search on Tuesday called Tafiti. You can see an on10 video about it here. I thought I would share it with you because there are some neat things about it:

  • I love the name: Tafiti means “Do Research” in Swahili. This is yet another confirmation of my theory that all the good names are trademarked - we are now having to use words from other languages.

  • The interface is built with Microsoft Silverlight 1.0. It demonstrates some of the cool things that you can do with the first version of the Silverlight platform (you don’t have to wait for the .NET enabled version).

  • It is built on the Live Search Engine APIs. I know it is not seeing the traffic volumes of the Google home page or even the Live home page, but the performance seems acceptable given that the client is seeing a lot of the traffic.

  • It is an attempt to address one of the key issues I see with search as we know it today. It is not just about searching for the data, but about finding it and organizing it. You can “file” the results on one machine and access it on another. Even if one of them is a Mac. 🙂

As you check it out, remember that this is an experimental interface. It will doubtless see some tweaks as they get feedback on it and one day it might just disappear.