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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?"
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!
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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.
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
...it is "Optimized for IE & Broadband Users". Google is not so.
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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!
Though, it can help you find Slashdot http://us-search.blinkx.com/BlinkxBroadband/?q=lit igious+bastards&x=10&y=6
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