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Blinkx and You Won't Miss It
WebfishUK writes "The Guardian is running this story about Blinkx a a kind of "search companion" which aims to bring internet searches in closer contact to what you are working on. Its total search approach (including email attachments, blogs and local files) seems to have some parallels to Googles Gmail engine. Could this be the first real technology threat for Google?"
No.
:
Maybe we should update the old UseNet cliche
Imminent Death of Google Predicted : Film at 11
An even quicker way to find porn, music, and movies. If this searches IRC channels too, we'll be set for life!
Moderation Insight
..is Google's GMail an engine?
Isn't this just a clone of Dashboard?
Our Commitment To Your Privacy
Your privacy is important to us and blinkx makes every endeavor to ensure that all of our products protect your privacy.
Most importantly, BLINKX NEVER REMOVES, COPIES, FORWARDS, AMENDS OR OTHERWISE MOVES ANY OF YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION from your COMPUTER (INCLUDING YOUR E-MAILS AND DOCUMENTS). YOUR INFORMATION STAYS ON YOUR COMPUTER.
blinkx works by comparing relevant information to deliver results, but never uses the original documents. The only actual hard information blinkx collects is your e-mail address when you decide to download the blinkx client.
We use the information you directly provide about yourself purely for this blinkx beta program. We do not share this information with outside parties and for no other commercial matters. When we receive email correspondence, we use return email addresses to reply with the information requested. Such addresses are not shared with outside parties.
Should you have other questions or concerns about these privacy policies, please send us an email at feedback@blinkx.com
blinkx's Website
This policy only addresses our activities from our servers. Other websites (including those that we link to and third party websites or services that we co-brand) may have their own policies, which we do not control, and thus are not addressed by this policy.
This site recognizes the home server of visitors, but not their e-mail addresses. This site also uses "cookie" technology so that we can better understand how to improve the experience of visiting our website. Also, blinkx tracks the Internet address of the domains from which visitors are coming and uses this data for statistics and analysis on the levels of success of our web programs, but the name of the visitor remains anonymous.
The names and contact information of persons who request information about blinkx, its subsidiaries, its products and/or its services are added to our data base, so that they may be contacted in the future regarding blinkx's products, services or future opportunities. This contact may occur by e-mail, telephone or mail, as blinkx deems appropriate. We do not sell or rent any information about our visitors, and we have no plans to do so in the future.
We use industry-standard efforts to safeguard the confidentiality of your personally identifiable information, such as firewalls and secure socket layers where appropriate. However, "perfect security" does not exist on the Internet.
You acknowledge that acceptance of this privacy policy, as updated from time to time at this location, is a condition to your use of our website and you agree to be bound by all of its terms and conditions.
If you have any questions regarding our policies please e-mail blinkx's webmaster at feedback@blinkx.com
blinkx home page
Free advertising on The Guardian and Slashdot can't hurt.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Wow, and people made such a fuss over Google reading your e-mail for ads, doesn't look like this is any better:
And you have to do nothing! Whenever you browse a website, read a news story, check your e-mail or write a document, blinkx automatically delivers suggestions from the Web, news or your local files; which you can view by simply clicking the links or rolling over to get a summary of the information found.
Not only email, it does everything!
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
For some reason the words "search companion" always make me cringe.
On one hand this is obviously potentionally spyware. I mean, it logs everything you do, and advises you to check out such and such. However:
Did anyone check out that graphical linking system? It was genious. You go to a seed link, and it spiders from there. Graphically representing the links each time. So you search for "frogs" and it starts a "frogs" seed. Then a few branches come out, such as "frog legs", "cromwell's frog" and "horned frog". Then those branch new links as well. And it just keeps going. At first I said "this is stupid, I searched for a broad term, and only get 3 links?" but then I watched as it added sublinks to main links, and was very impressed.
a threat as long as it's only on Windows. IE security will just keep blinkxing yr system down.
-- Why keep us waiting? We are not made of time.
Google searches blogs too. So their USP is that it "scours" your hard disk and emails and lots of other "local" information as well. That's exactly what spyware does.
Heck, I think (not sure here) that the Myway and other spywarish IE toolbars provide a search box to search the web while monitoring my "local" activity.
I really don't see what the big deal is here. It's a whole lot of BIG words (contextual/etc) without much substance.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
There was an article a while ago about using Google to search for "hidden" files and such on servers. There was an interview with a guy who did it and everything. If Google can already do this and Gmail can search your e-mails (some of us lucky ones of course), why do we need a crappy thing to "enhance it"?
I like muppets.
New technology promises to destroy Mecha-Google... In Japan.
So search engines have gone from searching a dedicated database to searching the text on the internet. Then it was searching images on the 'net. Now they can extend that to searching your email and local drives, all with one interface.
Cool.
But if you really want to impress me, make one that can search my house, my pockets, and my kids' rooms for my keys and wallet....
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
Worse that CmdrTaco!
Holy shit! The submitter's grammar is worse than CmdrTaco's!
GUESS WHO? You!
Casual Games/Downloads
Hardrives an order of magnitude too small, and broadband an order of magnitude too slow....
It sounds like what google ads does anyway from within the unpaid versions of Opera.
This sig no verb.
I'm sorry, when you asked if this was a technology threat to google, did you mean to indicate that you'd tried the technology? I'm working on a project on the CRM industry right now and just tried a variety of searches in both blinkx and google, and blinkx was not only less relevant, but also way, way slower.
Read jack phelps dot net
Usenet? That posse of Luddite introverts stopped being relevant five years ago.
The thing is that google is limited to a website, that means that you have to run a browser every time you want to search for information.
Its seems to be a good idea to use a software to do all that work (they are right, its even faster) but some of us are so paranoid about spyware that we can't trust anyone.
So its up to you if you want to try it. I'll wait until they release the linux port.
the e-mail part of blinkx only works with outlook (express) and eudora.
Could this be the first real technology threat for Google?
No.
The BBC is also running a story on this.
this functionality has existed on OSX for several years now..
"Sorry Im not more user-friendly."
Considering everyone from slashdot just searched using their wesite, the speed has been reduced to a relaxing 4000000000 ms
With any luck, this will offer another major engine though. The less people who are using one search engine, the harder it is to build a page just so it will come up quickly in search results.
Isn't Blinkx the name of that purple ape on that Bonzai Buddy adware/spyware?
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
...it is "Optimized for IE & Broadband Users". Google is not so.
"If you have done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways" -- hhgg
Yeah, Blinkx. I remember this back when it was called "Bonzi Buddy".
A good review of Blinkx with some discussion. I've also got a post about Blinkx that includes links to discussions of Linux version of something similar (Dashboard) and Microsoft's attempt (Implicit Query).
Watson delivers context-aware intelligent information retrieval technologies to create critical search improvements. With Watson on the desktop, users get the information they need from a variety of private and public online sources -- delivered automatically while they work. You can learn more about Watson at http://www.openroad-tech.com
The system came out of the research of Jay Budzik at Northwestern's Intelligent Information Laboratory.
in soviet russia...web searches YOU! (in japan)
Maybe this is a threat to Google, but I don't think the competitors are far behind. Nat Friedmans Dashboard and Sideboard have been mentioned elsewhere, and it seems like Microsoft is planning a similar application themselves.
Apparently Google is planning local hard drive searches as well, in a pre-emptive move against improved search techologies that will be a part of Windows/Longhorn.
So I guess Blinx won't be left alone for long. However, when it comes to search, the more players the better. Google is well on its way to become the new Microsoft, and I don't think it's in anybodys best interest to get a search monopolist.
This sounds a LOT like Spotlight, a search technology built into Apple's next major Mac OS X revision, 10.4 Tiger. Of course, Blinkx could be anywhere from coincidence to an unusually fast and successful emergency-Apple-ripoff.
Signature.
Google with their fancy alogrithmithings, netforks and other gizmos, I'll just sit on my front porch and read the paper like I always do.
A search for "google" only brings up pages on *.google.*, and google.com is near the end. Either they don't index many pages or they limit the number of results for each search. (It's also possible that they just hate google.)
This can easily be wiped out by companies like Microsoft and Apple anyway. In Apple's case, all they would need to do is link Spotlight with Sherlock with some simple plugin.
The reason Google can compete is that it isn't an application that you have to download. Anything that is a downloadable application will be easily snuffed by major software companies like those that make instant messaging apps like Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, and Apple.
With these two...
l ight.html
1) Spotlight
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/spot
2) Google
http://www.google.com
I won't need anything else. I wish "Search Engines" was a catagory so I could uncheck it and ignore all search engine news. I've got 1 and 2. I'm done.
the ok.txt stuff seems to be a check for open proxies. See my journal for a discussion on this. The other stuff is pretty lame attempts to screw up wndows boxes. Again, see my journal entries.
This seems and interesting concept... But could they PLEASE not use light grey text on a white backround.
This thing is hurting my eyes.
Sounds just like the Remembrance Agent for emacs which has been around since about 1996. It's also similar to the Dashboard program that Nat Friedman made for Gnome. There's enough prior art that I have no doubt that blinkx will get a patent.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
in our journal, it looks to be robbIE.snoop?
This harkens back to the good ole Haystack doo-ma-jiggy that came out of MIT sometime ago (slashdot Here and MIT HERE)
The concept is a simple one. Don't keep things in order in your folders in email or on your machine anymore. Just dump it all in one big place and have a meta engine of some sort index it all for you and then build queries for what you need. Realistically this is a great idea for those folks that had problems using the analog file cabinet for so many years (ala Jimmy James and the file of banana under "bright curved yellow things" for instance). The potential for abuse is really no greater than if M$ were to upload all of your "explorer find" searches back to Redmond. Those of you that us XP when you have to will notice that there is even an option to save a search query now for quick use within the XP shell. All this new company has done is just made it a little easier for the typical end user to create their search meta engine. The MIT one was brutal for a learning curve and more importantly it didnt have a decent place to put advertisements!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"search information from your desktop"
...
This one feature is enough to know that Blinks is not going any where.
I don't know why people are still tied to the Desktop. One of the great success of Google is that its not tied to the desktop (yeah, I know they are working on desktop tools too).
People travel and move, change computers, change system, reformat...blah..blah. All that learning over your desktop is of no good use.
Beauty of google (web interface search) is i get the same great results no matter where I acces it from, which machin I access from
Desktop search sucks...but the concept of desktop itself sucks in the first place.
I guess that I'll just stick with `find | grep` and grepping through my mail directories. No biggie, can probably find what I'm looking for quicker anyways.
Optimized for IE & Broadband Users
I was not tracking recent haxor lingo developments, but doesn't
"Optimized for Broadband" mean "Now With Even More Bloat" ?
Am I supposed to be excited by it ?
3.243F6A8885A308D313
First off: Blinx requires XP or 2000. Sure, that's a big market, but even in windows, 40% of people still run windows 98.
IE is required, though mozilla support is supposedly in dev.
Second of all, did anyone try out blinkx broadband.... what interface woes. Slow, bloated, and the big U word: UGLY! The licence is also not exactly optimal....
Since it requires Windows only the masses will be able to use it. As I am typing this on a Mac, I have yet to use it, but it sounds like spyware that catches the ideas of what people are looking for. Why not build this into a website like google or make code it in Java so everyone can use it? I see this as much as a threat to Google as HotBot, Altavista, or Excite.
install a spyware agent on your system? no thanks. i like my data. and i'd like it to be mine. it's up to me alone whether i want to share my data with the wider world. blinkx as a threat to google ? not a chance. google can sleep easy, as i'm sure they are already doing.
Hmm, now that Slashdot is accepting submissions for spyware, I think they should create a new category. They didn't accept my submission for Bonzi Buddy!!!
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
I see this as unlikley. Google has technology so advanced it is surrounded by "top secret" style secrecy. In other words we have no idea what Google is working on. What we do know is it is always something revolutionary and suprising. Only time will tell but it is reasonable to expect that Google is already working on the next big thing and is more likley than not to continue to be on the razor edge of technology
411 Y0UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 70 U5!! -NSA
what google is working on :)
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Last time I checked, Blinkx needs the XBox hard drive to support its '4D' gaming feature...
Watson delivers context-aware intelligent information retrieval technologies to create critical search improvements. With Watson on the desktop, users get the information they need from a variety of private and public online sources -- delivered automatically while they work. You can learn more about Watson at http://www.openroad-tech.com
The system came out of the research of Jay Budzik at Northwestern's Intelligent Information Laboratory.
... I, like many others I suspect, simply won't install blinkx because it requires IE, which I refuse to use anymore.
Long live FireFox/Mozilla.
Did you even look at their homepage before suggesting they are a threat to google? It is horrible. Their motto is "blinkx And You'll Never Miss It." They can't capitalize their own name but they can capitalize "And." Looks like a spyware company without a webmaster to me.
Threat? Google? This must be a joke. Maybe Webtek is a threat as well.
....talk about astroturfing....
Does anyone know of a Spotlight-like search mechanism for Win2K? No, I'm not interested in WinFS. I want something that will index every local file/email and let me search it via a live query like Spotlight will.
I know there are shareware projects like this for the Mac. Does anyone have any experience with shareware products like this for the PC? Anything you like?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Though, it can help you find Slashdot http://us-search.blinkx.com/BlinkxBroadband/?q=lit igious+bastards&x=10&y=6
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
At first, I thought this was somehow related to Blinx- The Time Sweeper, one of the worst concepts ever to hit a game console.
All that stuff is very cool, what it makes me wonder is how much cooler the stuff they don't make public is.
411 Y0UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 70 U5!! -NSA
with BlissX, my band. Had to clarify this.;-)
blinx only allows "approved" reviews mmmm yessss
no firefox support
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
I won't even try it until I get some serious assurances that this isn't going to puke spyware on my machine.
If they were charging money for it I'd be more comfortable with it- it would be obvious where the profit is coming from!
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
BLINKX NEVER REMOVES, COPIES, FORWARDS, AMENDS OR OTHERWISE MOVES ANY OF YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION from your COMPUTER (INCLUDING YOUR E-MAILS AND DOCUMENTS). YOUR INFORMATION STAYS ON YOUR COMPUTER.
How do they actually perform a search relevant to the user then? Through the power of ESP? Does it install a feckin' UGella.dll or something?
I think they should have a special section at the top of the page where the top three stories are the sponsored stories that always seem to filter in with the rest, but that we inevitably catch.
This story was nothing more than a press release, and Blinkx has practically zero chance of being a threat to google, especially with the way it generates ad revenue (read some of the other posts here to find out how).
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Considering the fact that most people who try out new technology trends like these don't use IE, wouldn't it help blinkx if they removed the note 'Optimized for IE'??? To me, that was a turn-off.
It's interesting what good pedigree and some good PR will do. The app. is destined for nothing though - no-one really wants to search locally and on the network at the same time. "Where did I lose my files? Was it here, on my laptop, or over there, on the ever-expanding web?" The only interesting thing is the Gruaniad article which puts the buzz down to blogs. Which is cute really, PR that incrimintes blogs as a way of hiding the fact that this is just PR.
Suttree, a weblog about casual games development
Without support for Mozilla, I doubt it works on any *nix.
A search engine that works on one platform is not much of a search engine.
n00b
from their website:
blinkx is not currently available for Macintosh or Mozilla, but due to your requests, we're working on it!
As disappointed as I am that it is not available for Firefox or Mozilla yet, this sounds like a lousy troll.
Could this be the first real technology threat for Google?
Maybe, but it's kind of a moot point because that's a really stupid name. I didn't read the article, and quite frankly I don't have to know that this won't catch on unless it's licensed to/duplicated by someone else who gives it a reasonable moniker.
"Oh I found it using Blinkx"? What the hell where they thinking...?
grib.
maybe
desire to inflate stock price can do wonders for that kind of curiosity :)
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
MS might come out with a new filesystem anyway that is indexed. So lets see how blinkx does.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Anyone else heard rumours that Amazon are behind this?