The Blinkx system claims to do away with search engines by watching the user input to common programmes like internet explorer and word suggesting related sources, now there are others who do this and like them Blinkx disposes of all data after the search results are created. But unlike the others Blinkx finds results from 6 channels or sources of data these are  websites, news sites, Blogs, broadcast news (video and audio), local files, and shopping, they are all represented by an icon on the Blinkx toolbar.

The web results are possibly the weakest channel but Blinkx admit that they are still in the early stages of indexing, the blog and news tool is very good offering some quite up to date results on our test searches, the shopping channel is the only commercial element of Blinkx and is easily avoided if you don't want to be sold too.

Perhaps the bit that has got us hooked is the local file search, I'm sure like us you have 2000 documents on your local hard disk and perhaps even more on shared company drives, well you can point Blinkx to index them and make them available to be a search channel. This proved its weight in gold this week when we were searching for a contract and all related email correspondence, Blinkx searched the 2000 documents and located the contract with ease and then quickly sifted through the 5000 emails in LP's inbox (he's a bit slack in deleting them) and found the email trail relating to the contract.

The simplicity of the Blinkx search is its winning feature, you can click the icon on the system tray for a more traditional interface or just go with the Blinkx toolbar which sits at the top right of the application window, you don't really notice the engine working its just there when you want it. Kathy Rittweger joint founder of Blinkx said, "When we were developing Blinkx, we learned that people really just want to get to their destination. They're not interested in the machinations and complexity of the engine, so we simply put the engine back under the hood where it belongs.

With engines Like Google and Yahoo becoming cluttered with non relevant results what could be better than a technology that searches more places and in the same time that a Goggle search takes, plus you can easily locate those files or emails trapped on your hard disk. The early signs are encouraging for small outfits like Blinkx, Microsoft look sure to include a desktop assistant with the next version of it's XP operating system "Longhorn" and Google in their recent IPO papers talk of providing a fuller user experience including email and local searching.

But for us Blinkx has solved a real headache of finding lost emails and documents and provided a quick and hassle free way of finding things from web and news sources, its got a way to go yet but it gets a thumbs up from LP.

Blinkx is currently available for IE and there is a Mozilla version available as Beta, there is currently no support for apple Mac or Linux, it's a free download and is available at Blinkx.com

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