Deep File Divers

Blinkx

This product analyzes the contents of your files and serves up the files similar to the document you're using, without your having to do any actual searching. It places a toolbar in Windows Explorer and at the top of your Microsoft Word and Outlook windows. The toolbar's buttons lead to documents, newsgroups, and Web pages with information related to the contents of the file you currently have open.

This paradigm shift in searching continues in Blinkx's search results window. The top of the window displays buttons assigned to Web Search, News Search, Video Search, Shopping Channel, Blogs Search, and Search All. These aren't very useful for unearthing local files, however. You can uncheck Web-related options in the Channel Picker section of the Settings dialog box and restart the search--but when we did that, we still ended up having some Web content in our results.

Blinkx doesn't place a search box in your taskbar or on IE or Windows Explorer toolbars (MSN Search Toolbar, Google Desktop Search, and Yahoo Desktop Search all provide one). To perform a search, you open the main Blinkx search window by double-clicking its system tray icon or by launching it from a Start menu or desktop shortcut. Blinkx claims to search audio and image files, but in our tests it failed to find them via keywords embedded in their comments. The program did better when the file names included the keywords, but even then it didn't find one of our test MP3 files when we searched for it by name. You can't tell Blinkx where to put the index itself, either, which can be annoying if your Windows drive is running short of space.

Holding your pointer over a file name in the results window displays it in the preview pane (see FIGURE 7). Image and HTML files render quite well, but document previews show the file's text with minimal formatting. Click an item to launch it in its associated application.