Tafiti is a fresh Microsoft move against Internet search giant Google. The Redmond company is slowly crawling up the search engine market, at an almost insignificant pace, while the major Internet metrics companies have it as the traditional bronze winner in a three-horse race. However, Microsoft did indicate a new ascendant trajectory in terms of increasing the volume of queries, and its search share in direct competition with Google and Yahoo. According to the latest statistics from Nielsen//NetRatings and comScore, Microsoft has passed the 1 billion searches per month milestone in the U.S., and the Redmond company is credited with approximately 13% of the search engine market via the combined results of MSN and Live Search.

In this context, Tafiti is but the latest Microsoft strategy to evolve its search offerings and to gain the edge against Google and Yahoo. The Redmond company bundled both Live Search and the Adobe Flash killer - Silverlight technology in order to produce Tafiti. "Tafiti, which means "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," Microsoft revealed.

Essentially, Tafiti delivers a mash-up of all Live Search services. Tafiti itself is nothing more than Silverlight-based search application built on top of the Live Search engine. When it introduced Silverlight, Microsoft focused on the cross-platform characteristics of the program. Therefore, Tafiti will work on Windows Vista, Windows XP and Mac OS X via Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 1.5.0.8, Firefox 2.0.x, and Apple Safari 2.0.4.

"This is accomplished by using "shelfs" to store one or more search results simply by dragging the search result onto one of five shelf spaces. Shelfs can then be stored for future use, or can be emailed or blogged about with ease. Tafiti includes a carousel to simplify the organization of returned search results. By rotating the carousel, one can access search results from the web, images, news, RSS feeds, or books. Tafiti also supports a Tree View where by search results are placed on the limbs of a tree which can be rotated and zoomed as necessary to visualize the search result," revealed Ahmed El-Ramly, Microsoft ISV Developer Evangelist.