Google challenger!

Strange name, colourful logo, powerful Search engine. Not it's not Google but Blinkx.

I use Blinkx since a week and it remind me the early stage of Google. Strong competitor, and already Blinkx has some unique features.

Before Google announced it, Blinkx can search TV and videos. It has also a desktop version and something really cool called SmartFolders.

Smart folders are a new, unique way of organizing information. Using blinkx to automatically update their content as new information becomes available, smart folders automatically organize information for you and assist you in the filing process. Smart folders are just like normal folders. You can create them wherever you normally create folders, be it on your hard drive, in your My Documents folder or on your desktop.

Once you've trained a smart folder, so that it knows what type of information you want it to store, it automatically gets smarter over time as it continually scans for new information and automatically updates itself. You don't need to remember a particular word or filename, if content is available, it is automatically brought to you without you having to even know of its existence.

For example, if you were doing a research project, you would create a folder and put some relevant files into it. Three days later, an email you receive on this subject would automatically be put into the smart folder for you. Similarly, if some information that is relevant to your project was published on a website, a link to this information would be added to your smart folder.

Smart folders can store the following information types:

  • Word documents
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  • PDF files
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  • PowerPoint files
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  • Excel spreadsheets
  • Emails
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  • Image files
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  • MP3 files
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  • Web pages
  • Video clips
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  • News articles
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  • Web pages
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  • Web logs

    • The only critic I have is the indexing process, too slow to be initiated first time you install the tool. Blinkx recommend to do the first indexation by night!

    I am not sure how many pages they already have indexed, but the results are relevant and limited to few pages. What is the point with Google to know that your search return 1 billion entries? No way you're going to browse every single one.
    You can also without clicking knows what's going on in the next result pages.

    The Visualizer is also a cool gadget, and you can move in the graphical tree view to search deeper.

    Try Blinkx, it's really worth it

     

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