Search tool offers links by reading screen

MIAMI - Startup company Blinkx has launched a search tool that compiles on-the-fly lists of Web pages and local hard-drive documents that are relevant to whatever text users are looking at on their screens.

The tool, also called Blinkx, can be downloaded for free at the company's Web site (www.blinkx.com). Once installed, it indexes documents on the user's hard drive, including e-mail messages and attachments and Microsoft Corp. Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. It also points users to five types of online destinations: general Web sites, news sources, multimedia files, Web logs and products.

At the top of users' screens, the program places six small icons for each of those destinations, which the company calls channels: local documents and the five online destinations. If users want to view a list of local documents that are relevant to what they are reading, they would click on the appropriate icon and a list of local documents would pop up. The other five channels work in the same way. Otherwise, Blinkx works unobtrusively in the background until users request to see a list of relevant documents or links.

"Blinkx is reading whatever I'm reading and then it's going off and looking for related content in these different channels and bringing that back to me before I even ask for it," said Kathy Rittweger, the company's co-founder. "You have a unified view of recommendations coming from various sources all at once."

Blinkx's purpose isn't to go head-to-head against the big search engines from Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. "That would be quite daunting for a little company like us," Rittweger said. "We've taken the search engine and removed all the mechanics of search like coming up with keywords, looking at results and figuring out which ones are relevant and which ones are not. We're making the technology figure all those things out for us."

By combining the ability to search a local hard drive as well as a variety of online sources, Blinkx has jumped over much bigger competitors that are still talking about technology that Blinkx has in fact delivered, said Gary Stein, a Jupiter Research analyst. "It's the classic small company that moves quickly," he said. "They're definitely innovating."

Although Blinkx's Web index can't compare with the ones from Google and Yahoo, the tool is significant because it offers a different way to search, according to Stein. "It's a software application that just listens and pays attention to what you're doing, and (based on that) provides you with links as if you had conducted a search," he said. "I've tried the product and I'm surprised at how well it works and how relevant the results are."

Currently, Blinkx can index e-mail from the Qualcomm Inc.'s Eudora program and the Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express clients, but it hopes to add support for IBM Corp.'s Lotus Notes clients before the end of the year, Rittweger said. Its local hard-drive indexing is currently limited to text-based files, but the company wants to enable the product to index local multimedia files as well, such as video and audio files, she said.