by CIO Staff

Blinkx to Offer Automatic Search Tool

News
Mar 07, 20062 mins
Enterprise Applications

Blinkx, a search company, Tuesday will unveil a free downloadable tool that examines the webpage or document displayed on a user’s computer screen and automatically conducts a Web search for related content, CNET News.com reports.

The search tool is not a new product, rather it’s built on a two-year-old application.

The tool alerts users when it has located relevant data by displaying different icons in a toolbar to represent various types of information, like webpages, video or images, CNET reports. Users can view the selections one by one or all together on a single page, according to CNET.

The program behind the automatic search is the 1-megabyte Pico, and it determines what information the user will be interested in from the context of that person’s screen, according to CNET.

Pico collects news posts, webpages, video, photos, blog entries, Wikipedia posts and information on products from shopping sites, CNET reports. The program even pulls data pertaining to people from MySpace.com, according to CNET.

Whenever a user leaves one webpage and lands on another, Pico performs a separate search and new items become available through the tool bar, CNET reports.

Smart Folders can be created for particular topics, and Pico will continue to populate the folders with relevant information even if the user is surfing a completely unrelated page, according to CNET.

Blinkx hopes to profit from the program by employing advertisements related to content Pico decides is relevant to the user, CNET reports.

For related news content, read Oracle Offers Stand-Alone Enterprise Search.

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