Topic: Automatic search tool launched

[Clive]

March 7, 2006
Quentin Reade

Search engine company blinkx has launched a new product that looks at what you are reading or writing and performs automatic searches for you.

The information that the application, called Pico, finds is then displayed via desktop icons.

The Pico icons each represent a different type of content: news, blogs, video, web, Wikipedia, images, shopping, and ?people? - information from online communities, including MySpace.com.

Suranga Chandratillake, founder of blinkx, said: ?With Pico, we turned the search paradigm on its head, and asked, 'what if search could be brought to you?'

?While others, including Microsoft and Apple, have talked about the potential of implicit search before, blinkx has once again pre-empted others by making it reality first. More than anything else, Pico is about the possibility of search-less search.?

Chandratillake said that as you work, Pico reads your active screen, infers the meaning of what you're looking at based on context, and then dynamically retrieves relevant information from across the web, including next-generation content, such as blogs and rich media. It works invisibly, so that you only see the results of its search if you click on a relevant channel.

Pico is available as a 1MB download from the blinkx homepage.

http://www.blinkx.com