Tafiti: Searching With Silverlight

Tafiti is a Microsoft search front-end 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. It's
an experimental Microsoft search mashup application built around the
company's Silverlight cross-platform streaming media technology and
Microsoft's Live Search engine. Microsoft has been struggling for
several years to catch up with Google's and Yahoo's search engines
after initially missing the Internet search wave. The combination of
Live Search with Silverlight's cross platform imaging could help give
those efforts a leg up as Microsoft moves further along with its Live
"software plus services" initiative to transform the company. Tafiti
lets users perform multiple searches, and store the search results
for later retrieval. One of the defining features is a set of onscreen
"shelves" where the user can drag and drop interesting search results
into stacks that can be labeled, e-mailed to others, and posted to
blogs. Another feature lets users view a tree representation that
slowly cycles through search results. Silverlight provides a
cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering rich Internet
applications, two- and three-dimensional graphics, text, animation
and video to a wide variety of form factors and platforms, according
to company statements. As Silverlight, which supports a subset of
Microsoft's .NET Framework, becomes more programmable, it promises
to challenge competing technologies such as Adobe's Flash. Microsoft
said Tafiti supports Windows Vista and Windows XP Service Pack 2,
including Internet Explorer 6 and 7, and Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.8, and
Firefox 2.0.x. It also supports Apple Mac OS X with Firefox 1.5.0.8
and Firefox 2.0.x, as well as Apple Safari 2.0.4.