I have been playing with the new search engine called Tafiti and luv the functionality! Tafiti, which means “do research” in Swahili, demonstrates the types of Web applications that can be brought to life with the new Silverlight technology.  I found very quickly some people who had been blogging about my blogs which I had somehow missed before! And I like being able to move searches to a shelf system to the right side of the screen.  :o)

The site helps people use the Web for research that spans multiple queries and sessions by helping them visualize, store and share the result.  Search is becoming increasingly specialized, across different user scenarios, vertical subject areas and entry points.  What works well for simple destination searches doesn’t necessarily work as well for more sophisticated research projects.  Tafiti uses Silverlight for richer visualizations in conjunction with Microsoft’s Live Search engine.

The site is live as of this morning; you can try Tafiti following these steps:

• Go to http://www.tafiti.com
• Enter a search query
• Drag interesting results to the shelf on the right.  Each box on the shelf can be used to save a related set of results.  Shelf contents can be saved and shared. 
• Use the carousel at the bottom left to do different types of searches (image, blog, etc.)
• Visualize your results using the Tafiti Tree View.

There is a podcast about Tafiti on Channel 9 and a video on on10.net that might be interesting too.