Microsoft launches Tafiti - Search and Silverlight experiment
Tafiti, an experimental demonstration site that combines Live Search with Silverlight has just been launched. Its described as follows: … Search results are presented in the central column, with the right hand "shelf" …
Context & Ripple Effects
Tafiti is the third public showcase Microsoft has built on Silverlight this year: after the "Breaking Out of the Browser" push from the Live Search team in March and the Popfly mashup creator in May, the company is now pointing its new runtime at its weakest consumer franchise. The demo wraps Live Search results in a Silverlight shell with a central results column and a right-hand "shelf," and it landed alongside a confirmed piece of internal research arguing that much of search-ad spending is wasted on branded-keyword clicks — a framing that makes rethinking the search experience itself look strategically motivated rather than cosmetic.
The pickup was broad but shallow: TechCrunch ran it under a skeptical headline asking whether anyone would use it, and Channel 10 gave it a first-look walkthrough — attention to the technology, not the product. That split captures the real question: whether Silverlight needs a flagship consumer demo more than Live Search needs a new interface.
First-order effects
- Silverlight gets its most visible consumer-facing demonstration yet at exactly the moment Microsoft needs developer proof that the runtime can carry full applications, not just media playback.
- Live Search gains an experimental surface where result-presentation ideas — shelves, carousels, rich media — can be tested without touching the production site or its ad plumbing.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in search face soft pressure to match richer presentation layers, since a visibly different results page is one of the few differentiation levers left when underlying web indexes are comparable.
- Every Tafiti visitor must install a browser plugin, which turns the demo into a distribution funnel for Silverlight itself — competing directly for the install base Adobe Flash already owns.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, search engines stop treating the ten-blue-links page as fixed infrastructure and begin iterating interfaces as brand differentiators — though plugin-dependent UIs remain a bet that runs against the web's drift toward open standards, and Microsoft's own research on wasted branded-keyword ad spend suggests the economics, not the aesthetics, will decide what sticks.
The trend: Search is becoming a front-end arms race, with Microsoft using Silverlight showcases like Tafiti and Popfly to differentiate on presentation while the underlying index race stays static.