Tafiti: New searching UX
Microsoft have released a public beta of Tafiti (which means "to search" or "to research" in Swahili, depending on which MSDN Blogger you read), they're new way of interacting with Live Search via Silverlight. It has a few handy features such as the ability to save search results across different sorts of searches (news, web, blog, images, etc) by simply dragging it to the side of the screen - ah, must be some sort of Surface search engine prototype! Another feature is the carousel between search types, which is pretty speed to pull those results down.
Overall, it is very pretty looking and even fairly functional. Unfortunately, Tafiti is a little too impractical to use to replace LiveSearch/Google. The Tree View (do a search of the 'web' type, then a TreeView button will appear up the top) is a fantastic example of where Silverlight (Flash would fall into the same category here) would benefit from hardware acceleration like its bigger brother WPF. Don't get me wrong, its useable as a tech demo, and it is fantastic to see Microsoft encouraging ISV's to develop Silverlight applications by demonstrating what it can do, but as it stands, Tafiti is just too slow to want to use on a day to day basis.
Hardware acceleration doesn't exist in Silverlight, which when I first heard about WPF/E was somewhat surprising. Without Hardware Acceleration, you don't have 3D. You have "2.5D", which can look just as good, but requires a lot more programming to achieve the same effect. Hardware Acceleration, as well as proper 3D, would really heat up the Silverlight Vs Flash debate. I guess one of the issues with implementing that would be - port DirectX to Mac, use OpenGL on both, or have seperate rendering on each Operating System.
Aside from those issues, well done Microsoft, looks cool.
Update: MSDN Blogs are really going nuts for this
This is by no means a complete list, but here are some of the blog posts on MSDN about Tafiti (mostly "we've just released…")
http://blogs.msdn.com/stanley/archive/2007/08/22/tafiti-search.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/singaporedpe/archive/2007/08/22/tafiti-search.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2007/08/21/Microsoft-Introduces-Tafiti.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/jim_glass/archive/2007/08/21/search-a-new-way-try-tafiti.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/nishant/archive/2007/08/21/tafiti-looking-at-live-search-in-a-new-way.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/clare_dillon/archive/2007/08/21/try-out-tafiti-a-new-search-visualisation-application.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/socaldevgal/archive/2007/08/21/beautiful-search-via-tafiti.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/ronang/archive/2007/08/21/tafiti-a-new-search-experience-with-silverlight-and-live-search.aspx (has a video about it)
http://blogs.msdn.com/markjo/archive/2007/08/21/tafiti-com-search-engine-built-on-silverlight.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/architectsrule/archive/2007/08/21/microsoft-launches-tafiti-rich-search-experience-via-silverlight.asp
http://blogs.msdn.com/mithund/archive/2007/08/21/what-is-tafiti.aspx
(Note, not as hyperlinks 'cause I don't want to ping spam. I couldprobably disable it, but I don't feel like wrestling with Wordpress)