Microsoft released Tafiti recently, and its is new “visual” type of search engine that rides on the Silverlight engine.  Hearing that its a slick piece of work (and being the kind of person who likes to try slick pieces of work), I checked out this slick piece of web candy.

Hey, did I mention how slick it is?

Anyway, being based on the Silverlight engine it is able to do a number of things — Flash-type things — that can’t really be done in the same slick way with the usual tools (CSS, PHP, Ajax and so on).  This includes some interesting animations that do serve some functional purpose.

For example, for every search, you can switch to a “tree” view, which populates a tree with different search results, with different branches on the tree representing a different search result.  The “tree” view also has a slider on the bottom which allows you filter out the results somewhat.  While this is an interesting tool, what makes it difficult to use is that there’s nothing which tells you why different terms are different sizes.  Presumably this means that they’re more “important”.  Also, its not entirely clear what it means to have different terms are positioned on the tree.  Do search terms lower down mean that they are less important than ones higher up?

Other interesting functions include the ability to click and drag results onto a sidepane, which allows you to temporarily save results, as well as the ability to change the search “type”, so that you search news, feeds, images and even books.

The biggest problem I have with Tafiti has nothing to do with the actual search results (which are powered by Microsoft Live Search), but an inherent problem with using a rich interface engine like Silverlight.  And that is you can’t really do things that are fairly easy to do when pages are served up like a “normal” W3C compliant page.

You can’t highlight stuff to copy and paste.  You can’t right click on any link to open into a new frame.   You can’t really print results (I get a blank page).

Also?  I like to use Firefox.  Maybe you do too.  Tafiti’s default position is to open up any new search term link into an entirely new window.  Not a new tab.  That in and of itself might be irksome, but in the latest version of Firefox, an error comes up telling me I have to stop blocking popups.  What’s *really* annoying is that it doesn’t actually trip the usual “Do you want to stop popups” error box *in* Firefox.  It just stops and waits for you to do it.

And it won’t let you carry on — because the error box continues to sit in front of you — until you disable pop-ups.

Anyway, Tafiti is slick, but the problems with Tafiti, I find, are really usability problems as they relate to using a product like Silverlight.  These aren’t insurmountable by any means, but they certainly will stop me from using it, even in a recreational sense — no matter how slick it is.