The search engine is dead! Long live the search agent!

July 15, 2004 9:02 AM

blinkx is a new contextual search agent that seems to be causing some excitement. Unfortunately, it is not available for Macintosh or Mozilla at present.
posted by davehat (13 comments total)

feh. Just did a vanity search and none of the 20 or so pages Google usually can find came up.

If this is their beta, better wait before going gold.
posted by darren at 9:26 AM on July 15, 2004

I tried BlinkX about a month ago. I was underwhelmed. For me at least most of my documents and work are stored in one way or other in Outlook, and Lookout does a much better job of searching through my email than BlinkX. Highly recommended (just a happy user, I should by a license actually...)
posted by costas at 9:34 AM on July 15, 2004

Since I'm using a Mac, I'll have to wait to play with it, but it sounds like Spotlight [on the forthcoming Mac OS X Tiger release] with web searching [It seems Apple will have a SDK for Spotlight so if Tiger doesn't ship with searching the web, someone will have an add-on].

I'm excited about Spotlight's ability to search my local system but I guess I'm missing something about needing to see both web searches and local content on the same results page.

Since only we special few get the privilege of running Mac OS X, blinkx might be solution for the unwashed masses.

Now Google's version of this makes a little sense if gmail takes off and it really the 'next big thing' since it can add local searches to your gmail/google search results. I'm still on the fence on gmail since I'm not a huge fan of webmail.
posted by birdherder at 9:44 AM on July 15, 2004

I just used it at school for some research, so far I kind of like it. It found me sources I hadn't found anywhere else.

I looked for a whole sentance though (question w/o the question mark) and it found me answers.
posted by Lizc at 9:58 AM on July 15, 2004

Didn't Autonomy or someone like that have a program that did this exact same thing back in 1999?
posted by kerplunk at 11:49 AM on July 15, 2004

What I’d like to see is a search engine that would let me choose to search certain categories of web pages – i. e. search only newspapers/magazine articles or only scientific/university web pages. That would be a great improvement. When you search for something now, you get all sorts of results mixed up. Search for ”Mars” and you get scientific web pages as well as pages from amateur astronomers, and then there’s a fan page of a band named Mars, and someone’s cat named Mars etc...

What do you think? Perhaps this sort of thing already exists?
posted by Termite at 12:23 PM on July 15, 2004

Hmmm, I have a handful of people I always search for when testing a search engine, Blinkx is the first search engine to find one of them that no other engine finds.
posted by page404 at 12:24 PM on July 15, 2004

You would be forgiven for thinking that Rittweger and her British business partner, Suranga Chanratillake, who used to work for the UK search engine company Autonomy, ought to be locked up for even thinking of trying to take on the almighty Google... (from the second link)

I guess that's your answer, kerplunk.
posted by NekulturnY at 12:41 PM on July 15, 2004

Termite, use the google advanced search page.
posted by Grod at 1:22 PM on July 15, 2004

kerplunk and NekulturnY: that's pretty funny... I guess everything old is new again.

Anyone up for a second dotcom bubble?
posted by reklaw at 1:31 PM on July 15, 2004

Here's an article from the Observer (Feb 2004) about Google's vulnerability to new search engines. (Its from the Networker column that's usually in the business section - covers some aspect of web related news each week, can be quite interesting, though maybe not too those of you who keep up with this stuff professionally)
posted by biffa at 2:09 PM on July 15, 2004

It's great, if spyware and adware gets you all hot and bothered.
posted by nyxxxx at 8:58 PM on July 15, 2004

Oh, and here's confirmation from slashdot,

"During my usage of the software, I saw numerous pop-under banners being spawned by Internet Explorer, even when I was using Mozilla Firefox 0.9.2 with Adblock and Flashblock! It turns out that Blinkx actually creates a pseudo-proxy server and routes all traffic through it. Even historically secure browsers like Mozilla Firefox 0.9.2 with Adblock and Flashblock were foiled by it."

I had popups, too. Ran search and destroy to get rid of it.
posted by nyxxxx at 9:16 PM on July 15, 2004