Wired @ Home

Search engines have been a hot topic lately and many new search engine sites have opened up. I've already reviewed 2, Spacetime and Hakia, but now Microsoft has released its own, Tafiti. At the time I wrote Beta Update, Spacetime was in its Beta 1 with many issues to fix, but now its very close to releasing Beta 2 with many improved features. I highly encourage you to visit SpaceTime to learn more and see more. They have a video up on the new features and the overall free product. Hakia however is in the midst of fully implementing its flagship feature, Semantic-Rank algorithm which is designed to extract meaning from your search phrases and questions. This is a massive step in bringing better search and more credible results to you. Another company that is using this type of technology is Vlingo. They offer a voice-recognition system for on the go Sprint users. It uses the Hieracrhical Language Model to recognize every single word you say and make educated predictions on what word you are going to say next based on the previous word uttered. On top of this, it will adapt, learn, and improve itself to understand new words, speech patterns and more.

The big news though is Microsofts new search engine called Tafiti. If you don't already have Silverlight*, the website will instruct you to download it. Once started, Tafiti loads surprisingly quickly and will position a search box in front of you. Once you've entered a phrase or keyword and pressed Go, the search box will slide to the left and below it, an orbit of the world, RSS, News, Images, and Halo icons will swirl around. These are just like the Google tabs of Web, Images, News, Groups, etc. After you've gone to the tab you want, you can click the result which has a larger description, or you can save that website by dragging it over to the corner which contains 5 empty slots. You can label those slots, email, or blog it (Windows Live Spaces). This is only possible if you have a Hotmail, MSN, or Live account. Not only does it display the results in such a cool way, they give you a second option to display it in a tree view which isn't the best but definitly looks cool.

Silverlight is basically another version of Adobe Flash but much better. This is why Tafiti can support such great graphics, video and animation. Sun Microsystems has already released a competitor for Silverlight days after its release called JavaFX. Currently, Silverlight is supported by the most popular broswers on Windows 2000 and up except Opera. The Mac versions are in the making and should represent a fair amount of the downloads. I won't get into the technical details of Silverlight but the jist is: it's more useable, superior graphics, animation, and video, more searchable, and doesn't need Windows Media Player, WMP Active X, or Windows Media plug-ins to be played. You can view some demos of the type of quality Silverlight provides on Fox. To learn more on Silverlight and other Beta products go to Beta Updates.