August 24, 2007

Microsoft launches Tafiti – A combination of Silverlight and Live Search

Tafity is a very interesting experimental search site from Microsoft which uses both Microsoft Silverlight and Live Search for richer user experience.

It explains as - “Tafiti, ("do research" in Swahili) is an experimental search front-end from Microsoft, designed to help people use the Web for research projects that span multiple search queries and sessions by helping visualize, store, and share research results. Tafiti uses both Microsoft Silverlight and Live Search to explore the intersection of richer experiences on the Web and the increasing specialization of search”.

You can select items like web, news, RSS, image from the left side for search. Search results can be dragged from the results pane to so called 'shelf 'which provides a place to store associated search results, such as the things you want to retain from a particular query or a set of queries. Hover over a particular shelf and click to type a label on the text box which appears.

You can also see research result as a tree view. Clicking on the Tree View link will provide a tree-based visualization of your web search results. This tree visualization slowly cycles through and displays all the results for your query. You can adjust how many results are show using the slider bar located beneath the tree. You can return to the main result window by pressing the ESC key or by clicking on the star in the top right of the screen.

Tafiti uses Silverlight 1.0 RC and AJAX to provide rich, cross-platform user experiences.

Visit and leave feedback on Tafiti by clicking on the feedback link located in the upper left of the Tafiti UI. In addition, you can send email directly to tafiti@microsoft.com

Requirement: Silverlight 1.0 RC on your computer to view the site.



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