blinkx 3.0 Links Users to World's First Fully Integrated Search Tool

SAN FRANCISCO, April 4 /PRNewswire/ -- blinkx, the smartest thing on your computer and on the Web, today announced the release of blinkx 3.0, the world's first fully integrated search tool. With blinkx 3.0 users can, for the first time, view results from the desktop, the Internet, television and the news in a single, combined list. blinkx, which is free to download at http://www.blinkx.com/ and already has more than one million users, has been changing the way people think about search since its launch in Summer 2004. This release is just the latest innovative milestone for blinkx, building on its unique Implicit Query (IQ) technology, and offering users unparalleled functionality across content from television, the internet and their desktops.

blinkx, a recognized technology leader in the search industry with a strong reputation for pre-empting established players such as Google, Microsoft MSN, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo!, today became the first player to offer users fully integrated search and a true single click search experience. blinkx users can now link directly to results from their hard drive, the internet, news and even television, all from a single search result list. Breaking the traditional content barriers that exist between information on a user's machine and internet and television content, blinkx generates an integrated results set, spanning a user's entire information landscape. Version 3.0 of the software also uses blinkx's Implicit Query (IQ) technology to link users straight to relevant information from the application where they are currently working. Without having to actively or explicitly fire off a search or even choose words to search on, IQ uses intelligent analysis of the page a user is reading or writing to find related information, again regardless of its source, whether the local computer, the internet or television.

In addition to fully integrated search functionality, blinkx 3.0 introduces a number of further advances including a fresh new look, a built-in document preview feature that supports more than 200 file formats and, uniquely, indexing of local Lotus Notes content and email. With document preview, users simply hover their mouse over a blinkx search result including remote results, and are automatically provided a preview of that piece of information, allowing them to rapidly ascertain relevance before actually opening the document in question to further streamline their search experience.

blinkx 3.0 also responds to recent concerns surrounding the security of other desktop search tools with a range of enterprise-grade security measures to protect user privacy and data integrity. These features include strong user authentication through full respect for Windows security profiles so multiple users of the same computer can use blinkx easily and safely without seeing each other's content. Behind the scenes, blinkx 3.0 also fully encrypts all communications between blinkx's various components.

"As a user, you generally don't care where something is -- if you have access to a piece of information, whether it's on your own machine, the internet or television, you want to be able to see it. Until now, users have been forced to use separate tools to find information from different places -- blinkx 3.0 turns that assumption on its head and brings everything to you in one easily accessible place. blinkx is already the tool over a million users turn to when they need to link between information on the internet, the desktop and television, and we're very excited about bringing all of that content together for the first time," said blinkx CTO and Founder, Suranga Chandratillake. "blinkx 3.0 continues blinkx's reputation for innovation and re-affirms our strong commitment to never resting when it comes to enriching our users' search experiences."

How To blinkx

blinkx thinks while it links. Because blinkx is not constrained by the limits of keyword-based technologies, it is able to extract the main ideas contained within any document and thus derive its meaning. blinkx uses patented Context Clustering Technology (CCT) to overcome the shortcomings of keyword technologies and to truly understand the ideas and context behind the words. blinkx applies its unique CCT ability to make the search experience faster, more accurate and more relevant. Approaches to searching through information using simple keyword query mechanisms fail because they do not provide enough context. In such cases, users are overwhelmed by hundreds or thousands results, all of which match the query, but many that represent the different contexts within which the query term or terms can appear. blinkx CCT is unique because it helps a user provide the context that is crucial to making keyword searching or organization -- it does not second-guess a user's needs, but seamlessly provides the automated guidance required to enrich the overall experience.

   Blinkx 3.0 Features
   User authentication
   Secure communications and indexing encryption
   File preview
   Implicit Query
   Audio/video search
   Full search capabilities for email attachments

   200 File Formats supported including:
     Text files (including .c .cpp .h .java and .txt)
     MS Word
     MS Excel
     MS Powerpoint
     Adobe pdf
     Html
     Mp3
     Windows media audio
     AVI (Audio Video Interface)
     Jpeg
     Bmp bitmap
     Gif
     Lotus Notes
     Outlook Express including attachments
     Outlook including attachments
     Eudora including attachments

  About blinkx

blinkx, the smartest thing on your computer and on the Web, is changing the way that people think about search. Only blinkx can harness the desktop, Web and TV -- unifying content with a one stop search tool. Available to users on the Web at http://www.blinkx.com/ and http://www.blinkx.tv/, as well as free to download, blinkx automatically and intelligently links to content anywhere and in any format, on the Web, on the desktop and even on TV. blinkx's conceptual toolbar means users are no longer limited to keyword search; instead, blinkx assesses all the information that the user is actively viewing, and automatically recommends and retrieves relevant content, from local, Web and TV searches, based on context. In addition, http://www.blinkx.tv/ makes thousands of hours of TV content fully searchable and available on demand for the first time. blinkx is a privately-held company based in San Francisco and London. More information is available at http://www.blinkx.com/.