Tafiti
Originally uploaded by Philipbradley.
Microsoft are experimenting again, this time with a thing called tafiti. Apparently Swahili for 'yet another search engine that no-one wants or needs' or some such. Or maybe just 'to search'. Anyway, it's new, and looks shiny, apart from the image of a very old catalogue card that they use as a search box, and which slides off to the side once a search has been run, wasting space, but looking funky.
Before you can use it you have to install something called 'Silverlight'. I don't know why and MS isn't saying, all they do say is 'just don't it!'. However, I'm a trusting soul, and if Mr BG wants me to install Silverlight to look at this thing, well, that's what I'll do. Dunno how many others will though - surprisingly it works on Firefox.
So, you get a catalogue card as your search box, whack in a search and get a bunch of the usual MS results up on screen. You click on the links, scroll down (only it scrolls off the end of the screen and I couldn't see anyway to move to see the rest of what I was being offered). However, you can also save results to little glass shelves (no, I'm not making this up) to the right of the screen. You can save these results between sessions, the idea being that you can create a whole bunch of results and collate them, which is a nice idea, though not exactly brand new.
There's also a 'tree' view, and the screen shot is taken from this page. It's clearly an attempt to be funky and down with the kids, and reminds me of visual search engines like Kartoo. So, nothing new there then either. Irritatingly, this tree like affair spins around, slowly and dizzyingly and made me feel quite ill. There were plenty of other bugs and glitches - slow loading, no loading, freezing and suchlike, but I guess that's to be expected as it's experimental, and so unfair to be critical, but if you play with this, expect it.
To be honest, I wasn't impressed, but you've guessed that already haven't you? It didn't seem to add much, and as an experimental search engine MS really do need to think a bit more outside their tiny box, because I wasn't interested or inspired. In fact, a very insipid search engine all round.
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