While the war of relevance between Google and Live Search continues unabated one thing that the folks at Microsoft have been doing more around is questioning the paradigm of how we search and deal with results.... and making those experiments public.

You may have seen an early attempt to put a more human face on searching if you'd used MsDewey to query the internet but the latest project presents a much more usable face to search.

Tafiti (apparently meaning "to research" in Swahili) takes the current search paradigm a little further using a combination of Silverlight and the Live Search APIs to allow you to search and filter in a very dynamic manner, focusing on web search, blogs, images or a mixture - and storing the results in collections (which if you sign in with your LiveID you can even keep with you across machines).

It's probably not going to totally replace search as we know it today, but it certainly presents a great new way of thinking about how you interact with search engines to actually find relevant results and manage the data you get back. Have a look at this video of it in action, and check it out yourself...