Tafiti search - review

Tafiti is another showcase project from Microsoft to demonstrate Silvelight capabilities. I came across it while reading a blog entry by Jim Glass (A developer at M$). The interface of tafiti was was impressive and had a nice feature to save the previous searches in a small post-it note like icons on the right hand side. Looking at if for the first time, I was impressed. But I felt there was something wrong. Lets dig further

1. My first problem was the layout chosen to display the search results. I believe most of us are accustomed to reading rectangular blocks of text. So when you are reading the text from the search results you can easily be tricked into reading next search result without even realizing you are reading next search result. I don't know whether it was intended but I found it confusing. If you don't get what I mean, see the pictures below



2. I believe a considerable number of computer users today have a scroll mouse. The scroll bar in the search results doesn't move with your scroll wheel. - meh, One good reason to avoid tafiti

3. The choice of colors also seem to be a little funny. In the search results, the Web Page title has a light blue shade and the URL has a light green shade. This is very much similar to some of the Google-ads that are displayed on blogs and other sites. Unless you look carefully, you are most likely to ignore this.

I have discussed only the UI part of tafiti. Will keep the performance and accuracy comparison of google and live search for another blog entry

Cheers
-/\/ishanth