If you dismissed Microsoft Silverlight as a technology you didn’t need to track, you might want to go over to http://tafiti.com - Microsoft’s brand new search engine interface written in Silverlight.

I happened across this item at Techno//Marketer (thanks Matt!). Matt Dickman does a very nice job on a screencast walking tafiti (which means “do research” in Swahili) through it’s paces.

While tafiti is very much a beta and broken in parts, the interface makes searching across the web, RSS, images, news and more dirt simple and fun. You click one of the icons on the left, see the results and can drag items off to the drawer on the right. There’s an alternative treeview interface that is pulling up a load of microISV links I’ve not seen in a way that make it easy to browse for items that catch your eye and open them in separate browser windows.

Now is this anything more than a pretty eye candy interface on Microsoft’s search web services? Nope. But its a really cool interface - and if they hammer out the bugs it might, maybe, give you a reason to try Microsoft Live Search. I would be very interested in seeing tafiti for Google.

And by the way - Matt reviewed tafiti on his PC naturally enough, and wasn’t wild about the fact that like using Flash on a new PC, Silverlight had to be installed. When I went to tafiti.com, that install took 20 seconds. That was on my MacBook Pro.

From tafiti’s FAQ:

“Tafiti is a Silverlight application and supports all currently supported platforms for that technology.

On Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2, this includes Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, Windows Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.8, and Firefox 2.0.x.

On Apple Mac OS X this includes Firefox 1.5.0.8, Firefox 2.0.x, and Apple Safari 2.0.4.”

[tags]microISV, silverlight, tafiti[/tags]

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