Microsoft have released Tafiti which they are describing as a experimental search front end. Tafiti, which means “do research” in Swahili (also known as Kiswahili), uses Silverlight 1.0 RC and AJAX to provide a rich, cross-platform user experiences and leverages the following Microsoft services on the backend.

It has a nice interface, with a lovely wooden trim, while the search term remains in the heading,

If they wooden trim is not enough Tafiti allows you go fully organic with their tree-view. The neat thing about the tree is that your search results move gently in a breeze not dissimilar to a rotary washing line.

TechCrunch asks the question that matters most: Will people use it? The answer: Probably not. Still it looks pretty cool.

Tafiti is best viewed as an open experiment and not a Google killer. Still, I’ll give it a go over the next week and report back on how it goes.