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For Immediate Release
By Making The Engine Invisible, Blinkx Ushers in A New Search Era
New Web and Desktop Search Tool Brings Search Results Before You Ask
JULY 22, 2004 — SAN FRANCISCO, CA — A free new search tool that thinks and links for you, eliminates the need for keywords or complex search methods, easily finding the information you seek whether it is on the Web, in the news or buried deep within files on your PC.
Launched today, Blinkx (www.blinkx.com) uses the latest self-learning algorithms to understand the context of what you are reading on your computer screen, such as documents, e-mails, Web sites, news articles, blogs and even videos. As you scroll through the text, Blinkx works in the background to instantly connect to related information on the Web and on your PC.
According to Blinkx co-founder, Kathy Rittweger, Blinkx is more than a search engine: “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.”
“By eliminating the mechanics of search, such as keywords or sorting through dozens of unqualified results, we drive users more quickly to their goal: finding something, even if they didn’t know it was there!”
Blinkx Gives PC Users Complete Control Over Information on the Web and on the Desktop
Blinkx is FREE to download at www.blinkx.com. Once loaded, Blinkx continually reviews what you are reading and sweeps the Web and your computer – silently and in the background – to generate links related to the concepts. These links change and refresh as you scroll through your information. By highlighting a word or paragraph, Blinkx will restrict its search only to information related to the selected text.
There are two ways to work with Blinkx:
Reactive Search generates recommended links without the user having to do anything – just click the mouse on the toolbar on top of the screen and a pop-up menu provides a collection of links to related information and summaries of their content.
Proactive Search allows users to click on an icon that rests in the system tray to input ideas using a natural language query (or old-fashioned keywords) to manually search for related concepts. These concepts are delivered according to where the information is available, on the Web, in the news or on your computer. You can even specifically search for things just in your email, or for only Word documents etc.
Blinkx Features
Blinkx channels scout for information in all the places relevant to you. Links to information are provided through five dedicated Blinkx channels:
• General Web sites
• Web-based news sources
• Web-based video and audio sources
• Web logs (blogs)
• Your local hard drive
The company will continually be introducing new Blinkx channels dedicated to commercial Web-based information, products and service providers.
Blinks scouts for information in all locations relevant to you. Blinkx not only searches the Web, but your local hard drive. In the near future, Blinkx will offer the ability to search other data locations, such as an attached hard drive or networked PC.
Blinkx scouts for information in all digital formats relevant to you. When searching various data locations, Blinkx will search for over 200 media types, such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents, attachments to e-mails, Acrobat PDF files and even video and audio clips.
Blinkx respects privacy. Blinkx does not collect any personal information about a user. The application is stored entirely on your computer and searches in an outbound fashion. As a result, we do not collect information about what is on your machine, where you have visited –not even an e-mail address or a cookie. We simply provide links based on what you see on your screen.
Today, Digital Information… Tomorrow, Digital Lives
As users grow to commonly access more and more information digitally through their PCs, Blinkx will evolve with them, allowing them to intuitively and immediately access other media such as DVDs, music, digital photographs or home movies.
“With a future where much of our life will be digital and portable, Blinkx will continue to evolve to reflect the growing need to make sense and link together all our digital world,” said Suranga Chandratillake, co-founder of Blinkx.
About Blinkx
blinkx (www.blinkx.com) is a new company that is extending the way people find and use information on the internet and their own computer. In addition to traditional search such as that from Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Ask Jeeves (Nasdaq: ASKJ), Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO), and AOL, Blinkx understands and links relevant information anywhere and in any format: on the Web, in the news or on the desktop – automatically, accurately and quickly. Founded in 2003, Blinkx is a privately held firm headquartered in San Francisco.
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