Tafiti is a new experimental search site from Microsoft. It has rich visualizations and aims to meet the needs of people doing research on the Web. Tafiti runs on the Silverlight browser plug-in platform (Microsoft's answer to Adobe's Flash) and requires you to install Silverlight if you haven't already. The underlying search engine is Microsoft’s Live Search.
AltSearchEngines editor Charles Knight has an overview of Tafiti. I checked it out too and found it to be an interesting visual experiment, along the lines of other visual search interfaces like Ms. Dewey (a Flash-based talking search engine developed by Microsoft). Microsoft knows that it needs to innovate in search to have any chance of making inroads into Google, so this is another experiment along those lines. Indeed the latest Hitwise stats show Microsoft falling even more behind Google and Yahoo:
Tafiti won't ever be a mainstream search engine, because ultimately speed and efficiency are what most punters want in a search engine - and Google continues to deliver on those things. However I can see Tafiti becoming a nice niche search engine for researchers, given more iterations. It may well contribute some technology to a future version of Live Search too.
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Those interested in another experimental search mashup and visualization tool may want to visit http://www.searchcrystal.com which lets you search, visually compare and share results from web, image, video, blog, tagging, news engines as well as Flickr images or RSS feeds.
Fred Wilson just mentioned searchCrystal on his blog: http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/08/searchcrystal.html
Posted by: Anselm | August 22, 2007 1:14 AM
KartOO is a metasearch engine with visual display interfaces. When you click on OK, KartOO launches the query to a set of search engines.
teksty32 - http://www.teksty32.com
Posted by: teksty32 | August 22, 2007 4:12 AM
A searchengine that only work on Mac and Windows, how dumb is that :)
Posted by: Atle | August 22, 2007 6:12 AM
Honestly, this is as ugly as it is useless. Don't we already have things like http://del.icio.us/ to track our bookmarks?
Posted by: Matt Stark | August 22, 2007 7:55 AM
Wow, it's about 5 times slower than Flash too!
Posted by: Tarwin | August 22, 2007 6:53 PM
As a visual layer on top of Live Search, it could be helpful to some researchers. It yet needs higher speed and better functionality to be useful. The fact is web search is getting visual. And that trend is being picked up by majors.
Posted by: Yakov | August 22, 2007 10:36 PM