Wrangling Results
Enter a term in the search box at Microsoft's Tafiti, click Go, and the service swirls into action: The search box slides to the top left, and five icons spin into view below it for searching the Web, news sites, images, books, or RSS feeds.
Tafiti's animated interface is one of the first apps developed for Microsoft's Silverlight environment (a technology challenging Adobe's ubiquitous Flash player).
Instead of sponsored links on the right side of the results, there are five empty shelves. Drag your results onto a shelf to save them in "stacks"; then log in to a Windows Live, MSN, or Hotmail account to see your saved searches the next time you open your browser. You can give your stacks names, send a stack to someone via e-mail, or post it to your Windows Live Space blog.
Search Gets Personal
If you're looking for someone rather than something, Spock may be able to help. After you create an account by providing your name, gender, and e-mail address, you fill out your profile by tagging yourself with your hometown, your interests, your high school or college, and any other information you wish. You can also choose to have a tagless profile, but where's the fun in that?
Of course, you can search for people by name, but you can also search for them by location, interest, age, sex, or other characteristic ("Incarcerated Celebrity" seems to be a favorite). The service keeps a history of your searches, and automatically lists your ten favorites.
There's a definite social aspect to Spock, and the demographic seems to skew to the 20s and 30s. But I'll wait before providing much data in my Spock profile, just to be on the safe side.
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