Tafiti, Silverlight & Live powered Searching

Microsoft has just released Tafiti, a mashup utilizing the capabilities of both Windows Live Search and Silverlight search engine, the name “Tafiti” means “do search” from Swahili.

News about Tafiti is HOT around the web, EVERYONE is talking about it! Check out Channel 10, TechCrunch, All About Microsoft, The Universal Desktop, etc.

Animations are sleek, but some of them looks “laggy” (Set Ease In and Out to 100%?), switching search options to different mediums (Web, Images, RSS, Books, News), is great, and its noticeable that there isn’t any page refresh, which makes the application feel much more like a desktop application, thanks to ASP.NET AJAX.

Windows Live Search still ain’t as powerful as Google or Yahoo, thus the results are still not that relevant, but it could all change if Microsoft moves in to buy Yahoo (Seriously?).

The overall effects and feel is still pretty much lacking, and like pointed out by Ryan, the tree view feature (that looks far too cluttered), its a very very viable, and potential feature, and it has been used before, where? WPF News readers, eg: The New York Times Reader, to find out more, check out Tim Sneath’s post on it.

Also, like Ryan Stewart noticed, its very similar to another search engine powered by Live Search, Ms.Dewey, and its absolutely GREAT to see that web search applications would evolve to RIAs, which will definitely will happen in the near future.

The idea of being able to save you’re search results in a side pane is absolutely great, something I’ve never thought of, but always needed. But still, the search result is cluttered, and too much graphics and effects are distracting, unless they come out with something much more simpler (yes, still with animations etc, but simpler), with better functions, nobody is going to use it.

But I don’t think it’ll be an issue, as most of the articles pointed out, the Tafiti project is most probably a test subject….for a much, much better search engine this.

PS: the logo reminds me of Six Feet Under, LOL