Microsoft Released New Search Engine Tafiti

Microsoft has released a new search engine called Tafiti which is powered by their Live Search and the Silverlight technology. Using Silverlight (which is Microsoft's answer to Flash), Microsoft makes the interface very decorated, a moved recently started by Ask.com. But there is no option to change the theme of the search interface yet.


The obvious new features of Tafiti are Save search result, Search term history, a Treeview of search results and a graphical search category.


You can label the saved search results and recall them when you need. You don't have to log in to save the search results, but if you clear your cookies, the saved results may disappear. There are five place holders and each of them can keep more than one search result.


The Search term history feature keeps a stack of your search terms so that you can access them back later. But, unlike a list, this stack doesn't allow you to go to any search term in any order. It is a stack—a last-in-first-out queue. So, if you searched 1)Google 2)Microsoft 3)Yahoo, you can go back to Microsoft but not to Google from your Yahoo search result page.


Tafiti also gives you a way to visualize the search results in a Treeview. But, it's too cluttered to be useful and readable.


There is also a graphical view of the Search categories each of which has distinct interface for showing the results. For example, the News search shows the results in a format akin to that of the newspaper.

Overall, Tafiti is a UI-enriched version of Windows Live Search, and the performance is unacceptably slow and it requires you to install Silverlight to use it.

This video takes you through the various features of Tafiti:

Until then...

Justin

Technorati Tag: Microsoft