Tafiti (beta)

It isn’t a country or lightly baked desert, but a new search engine concept from Microsoft. You will need to install the beta of Silverlight to experience it, but I found it to be pretty well done for a number of reasons.

It uses Microsoft Live Search as a back end, and allows you to search for a term or phrase – nothing new so far. But in one nice interface you can easily switch between web searches, image searches, news searches, blog searches, and book searches.

You can “shelve” a particular search if you like the result(s) building “stacks” of related results or sites. It has a unique, and fun, “tree view” that grows and morphs as the links flow across the Internet (needs work, but a good “hyperbolic treeish”

Pretty cool, though does contain “beta bits” so review on a non vital PC.

Ryan Stewart at the “Universal Desktop” blog has other interesting points about it.