I ran across this quote from Microsoft on Mary Jo Foley’s blog. She asked a question of Redmond on the capabilities of Silverlight content being searchable and spiderable by search engines. I thoroughly love well-produced software!

Microsoft designed Silverlight from the beginning to be easily accessible by search engines. Because it is simply a ZIP archive, a Silverlight application packaged in a XAP (the Silverlight application-package file extension) file is easily accessible to search engines without a special software development kit (SDK). And because XAML is W3C-compliant XML, any static textual XAML content can be easily parsed by search engines. Furthermore, any metadata embedded in the ZIP file is easily indexed by search engines as well. Silverlight applications also support deep linking as they easily consume the URL they were loaded from, and use information on the URL query string to rapidly load and display appropriate data. Finally, the Silverlight DOM itself can be easily inspected to detect all text, links and images that are being visualized by the control.So does this mean that Silverlight offers customers superior search engine optimization (SEO)? Yes. Not only was Silverlight architected to offer superior searchability, but Silverlight excels at enabling dynamic content published from content management systems to be easily indexed by search engines. By publishing dynamic content to Silverlight via XAML and XHTML mirroring, users are able to dramatically reduce the time it takes to optimize content for search engines.

BeetTV.com interviewed Marc Mercuri, a Platform Incubation Team Architect at Microsoft recently on Tafiti. Tafiti is an experimental search product which combines the companys Live Search offering with its Flash competitor, Silverlight. According to Microsoft, Tafiti, which means do research in Swahili, is designed to help people use the Web for research projects that span multiple search queries and sessions by helping visualize, store, and share research results.

Primarily Microsoft seems to intend Tafiti as a means of showing off Silverlight and indeed, Tafiti has a gorgeously slick front end. Search results occupy the main portion of the frame and the right hand side holds a shelf where you can save search results via drag-and-drop.

On the left is a carousel which allows you to cycle through the various search result options Web, Images, etc which can also be saved. All of your saved search results can be shared through Windows Live Spaces.

Very cool video demonstration.