Dustin's Tech Notes

If you have been like me and somehow missed information floating around about Tafiti, then you're in for a treat. So what in the world is Tafiti you might ask? Tafiti is a new Silverlight based front-end to Live Search (Check out the FAQ for a full description of Tafiti).  Tafiti is not your every day search engine in the sense that it comes with a "shelf" to store predefined searches, provides a Tree View to visualize results, and has a sweet Halo 3 theme. Lets walk through a few Tafiti features.

1. Our first step is to open Internet Explorer and navigate to http://www.tafiti.com. Notice the Halo themed SilverLight interface (Click the Thumbnail below to see larger image).  Here you can enter your search query and/or search options. Notice the rotating options underneath the search text box. Here you can choose whether to search the web, images, news, or RSS Feeds. So lets say we want to search the web for information on "tafiti search". So lets go ahead and type that into the search text box, then hit enter.

2. You should now see that our search results are returned in the center pane. You can click on any result to be taken to that website in a new web browser window.

3. As you are browsing the results, you see that you'd like to reference Stanley Tan's blog and review it at a later date. Lets save that blog to our shelf. To do that, simply drag the result name to the shelf.

4. After dragging the item to the shelf pane, you can reference it by simply clicking the item on the shelf. Doing so will bring up a list of "shelved" sites for that category (Note you can also send to your blog of email the search results to yourself.

5.  Now lets take a look at the tree view. To open the tree view simply click the "Tree View" link at the top of the results pane. This will create a tree to view the search results.

6. Next lets click the back button to return to the search results. Ok what if we want to search only "News". In this case click the newspaper icon on the rotating choices menu. You should now see some top stores related to Tafiti.

I look forward to tafiti as the search engine wars continue. Stay tuned. Tafiti can be access via the URL http://www.tafiti.com. Give it a spin for yourself.