{{for, the historical tribal area of Niue, Tafiti (tribal area) Tafiti was an

animated Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most ani ...

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

launched by

Microsoft Corp. Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

and TrappsInteractive to showcase the

Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe's runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a very small number of browsers. Whi ...

animation and video player. It was launched in 2007 and was discontinued in 2009.

Overview

The name Tafiti comes from the Swahili word meaning to "do research". The Tafiti search engine was a project driven by the Platform Incubation team in Microsoft as an effort to promote next generation search concepts and technologies such as

and the Live Search API. Tafiti incorporated visuals with common web searches. Searches were presented, through a graphic interface, with results appearing in a central column. Via a carousel on the left hand side, users could select the type of media to search in Websites, news feeds, books, or images. Results could be dragged and saved on a "shelf" on the right hand side. These results could then be e-mailed or added to a blog. Tafiti also offered a "tree view," with search results displayed as branches. On the Tafiti Website, Microsoft said the service was designed to "Help people use the web for research projects that span multiple search queries and sessions by helping visualize, store, and share research results." The service was intended to "explore the intersection of richer experiences on the web and the increasing specialization of search." Tafiti was discontinued in 2009 with the release of

Microsoft Bing Microsoft Bing (commonly known as Bing) is a web search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service has its origins in Microsoft's previous search engines: MSN Search, Windows Live Search and later Live Search. Bing provides a variety ...

. Source code was released in July 2008 on

CodePlex CodePlex was a forge website by Microsoft. While it was active, it allowed shared development of open-source software. Its features included wiki pages, source control based on Mercurial, TFVC, Subversion or Git, discussion forums, issue tracki ...

as part of the

Windows Live Windows Live is a discontinued brand name for a set of web services and software products developed by Microsoft as part of its software-as-a-service platform. Chief components under the brand name included web services (all of which were expose ...

Quick Apps project.

References

''CBC'', Microsoft launches animated search engine
Retrieved on August 23, 2007.

Retrieved on August 23, 2007.

External links

Tafiti Project at Codeplex
Discontinued Microsoft software Defunct internet search engines