Software searches without being asked
Seek and you shall find, says the Bible, and so does Google, our favorite Internet search service. But must we do the seeking? Why not have our computers find things for us before we ask, like a well-trained puppy delivering the morning paper?
A team of entrepreneurs have unveiled a piece of software that purports to do exactly that. The program, called Blinkx, doesn't quite live up to its billing, but still has its merits. At the very least, Blinkx provides a painless introduction to a way of finding data that we may all be using soon.
Blinkx is available for free downloading at www.blinkx.com. It runs only on Windows 2000 and Windows XP computers, though its makers plan to offer versions for older editions of Windows and for Apple Macintosh computers. Once installed, the software creates an index of the files on your computer's hard drive -- a handy feature which alone might justify the program's existence. But this is just the beginning.
Once Blinkx is running, pop open your Internet Explorer Web browser -- Blinkx won't work with alternatives like Opera or Mozilla.
Then visit any old website -- say, the official site of next week's Democratic convention.
Next, look at the upper right corner of the window. You'll see a tiny toolbar with a few icons, and you'll notice it changing color from light blue to dark, then light again.
This blinking effect signals that Blinkx software has done its work. Without your say-so, the program has examined the words on your Web browser's home page, and run them through an algorithm that tries to figure out what you're reading about. It chooses the words that it deems relevant and submits them to Blinkx's Internet search service.
The search does a lot more than riffle through websites. Remember the index of your hard drive that Blinkx created? It checks that index to see if you've already got files related to subjects on the page. Click the left-most icon, and you'll see a pop-up preview of your files on John Kerry and his party. Click the preview to read the entire file.
Next comes a news icon. Blinkx has scoured several online news services for stories related to the convention. Of course, it's also done a general Web search, and you can see the results by clicking the third icon.
Interested in buying a book on Kerry? Try the shopping cart icon, which shows the results of a search at Amazon.com. Another search looks for online videos related to Kerry, and the last option shows you the latest comments about the candidate from some popular Web logs, or ''blogs."
You end up with a remarkable collection of stuff, none of which you asked for. Blinkx doesn't wait to be asked. It hunts down data it thinks you might want, and downloads it in the background while you're doing something else.
If the Blinkx business plan works out, companies will pay to advertise their products and services through sponsored links that will be displayed separately from regular search results. But Blinkx doesn't just work when you're browsing the Web. The software also interacts with e-mail messages displayed in Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, and with text files in Microsoft Word.
The Microsoft-centric design of Blinkx may haunt the company in a few years, because Microsoft's engineers are hard at work on adding similar features to their own software. Microsoft calls it ''implicit query," the idea that a computer should implicitly recognize what matters to the user, without having to be told, and use that insight to provide still more useful data. It's one of the many concepts Microsoft's research labs is honing in hopes of putting it into the next version of the Windows operating system, which is due out in 2006. That's a long way off, giving Blinkx time to secure a foothold in the market, and to make some badly needed improvements in its product.
Consider our visit to the Democratic convention site. The news stories identified by the software weren't news anymore; they were four to five days old. The websites on display included a seemingly unrelated item about the Golden Globe Awards. The only book selection offered by Amazon had nothing to do with Democratic politics; it was a book on the Java computer programming language.
Some of this suggests bugs in the code, but Blinkx cofounder Kathy Rittweger said that it's mainly a problem of size. One reason Google provides such accurate data is that it has created an index of over 3 billion Web pages, giving it a comprehensive view of the Internet. The search engine that powers Blinkx has compiled only about 65 million Web pages, so many relevant sites just aren't there. Until the Blinkx database grows larger, it will keep spitting out mediocre results. That's why Rittweger is raising more venture capital to invest in a bigger Web index.
But Blinkx's chief problem will remain the same, no matter how large its database. Any implicit search system uses digital guesswork to decide what matters to a reader. Someone might visit the Democrat site for information on vice presidential nominee John Edwards, not his political party. But the Web links displayed by Blinkx offer generic information about the joys of being a Democrat. It's perfectly sensible for Blinkx to respond this way. But that's the problem; most of us aren't perfectly sensible. We often find Internet information by searching sideways, visiting sites with only a tangential relationship to the stuff we seek. Blinkx may never be much help in that sort of quest.
Still, it's good to have a piece of software that peers over your shoulder, pointing out Internet resources you never would have noticed. If you'd welcome some extra help with online research, Blinkx may be just the thing you haven't been looking for.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com. 