Microsoft has unveiled their new search engine that called Tafiti few days ago. It is a search engine that required Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-in in order to run in your browser. Though it was developed under the umbrella of Microsoft, the huge following that Microsoft had today doesn’t sufficiently large enough to make Tafiti a top-choice when we want to conduct searches on the Web. No doubt it is cool, unique, fully integrated with Microsoft’s Live search engine and built with a lot of colorful data when Tafiti returns a search query. That visualization of data, of course, is their major appeal. However, the cool user interface (UI) is attractive but hardly any people believe it will help Microsoft capture more market share in the search engine field. Will the clever name, i.e. Tafiti, stands for “do research” in Swahili, and the sexy UI increase the switching cost for the users from using Google to Live or this Tafiti?

As I use it for my very first time, I nearly can’t understand why Microsoft has chosen this UI design interface, at least now I know what a developer should do about the Silverlight plug-in. When you use Tafiti to search for some keywords, you’ll notice that a popup is stated that “Tafiti is trying to show the site you chose. Please disable your popup blocker to see your selection” will appear in front of your desktop or laptop screen. Though somewhat annoying, my preference browser, Firefox is keeping up with the increased number of popup windows. Moreover, you can’t back to the previous page as you click the back button in your browser, and there’s no navigation controls such as “Next page” being found on this search engine. In my observations, Tafiti will stands out a mile in a crowded field of look-alike search engines when we look for good looking search engine, but will struggle to find a loyal following when comes into feature usefulness.

For Microsoft, it’s OK when Tafiti still a test version of their new search engine. They have a great excuse when they still experimenting this new search engine. However, they tend to forget that Web searches had a commercial value and this type of search engine doesn’t create any value for the “Advertisers.”