Pico whistles through search while you work

Search software provider Blinkx is the first company to get a latent search engine to market with its Blinkx Pico download. Pico installs a desktop tool bar to users PCs which monitors the active documents in use and searches for relevant content as a user works.

"With Pico, we turned the search paradigm on its head and asked, what if search could be brought to you?" said Suranga Chandratillake, Blinkx founder and CTO of the new technology.

Blinkx describes Pico as a tool that removes the manual process of moving from one application where a user is working to the search engine to discover information. Over a year ago Microsoft's MSN search division revealed it was developing similar technology but has been beaten to the market by the London and San Francisco based Blinkx ( read Blinkx review here).

Pico is a set of channels at the top of the desktop, each channel represents a different information source, ranging from news, blogs, videos, web, Wikipedia , images and online community platform Myspace.com. The desktop tool bar reads the content of the active screen, inferring the meaning based on context and then retrieves relevant content from these sources for the user. Clicking on a source tab brings the search results to the fore.

Blinkx has also developed a workflow aspect to the new tool with a Smart Folders option for creating files to save your work in, which Pico will then automatically populate with search results related to the saved document.

There are network issues with Blinkx technology though, IWR's sister title PCW found the Blinkx desktop search tool was causing network and server issues which information professionals should be wary of.