Blinkx

Blinkx searches your desk and the Internet quickly, but its many limitations left us wanting more. Free download available here.

Blinkx Desktop Search, available as a free download, earns an A for originality, but a C for usability. Like Copernic Desktop Search and X1 Search, Blinkx is hot-rod quick, displaying searches on your hard drive and Web matches as fast as you can type. For example, if you had a file on your hard drive called myfinances.doc, as you typed m, then y, then f, the list of possible matches would decrease. Problem is, Blinkx doesn't search your entire drive. Unlike X1 Search, which automatically catalogs an entire hard disk, Blinkx forces you to select specific folders for indexing. That's fine if you always keep your Word docs in the My Documents folder, but should you go crazy and create a new folder, those files might not show up in a search request. It also won't index many popular file types, including JPEG and GIF images, and it lacks a proper file viewer for previewing documents and Web pages. However, Blinkx is still new, and we expect these features to be incorporated in later releases.

That said, Blinkx can be downright clever. We particularly like its Quick Launch feature, a six-icon toolbar that attaches to the top-right corner of whatever application you're using. Quick Launch automatically finds documents and Web links related to contents of the open window. Say, for instance, you're reading this review as a Word document. When you click Quick Launch's Local Documents icon, a drop-down list would show brief, three-line summaries of related files on your PC, such as reviews of Copernic Desktop Search or X1 Search (if they exist). Click the Web icon, and Quick Launch displays a list of related pages on the Net. In our tests, the toolbar worked with Internet Explorer and Word, but not with Outlook, Works, or America Online.

As a simple desktop file finder, Blinkx needs bifocals. It indexes only Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Acrobat, text, and e-mail files. Furthermore, Blinkx displays a pop-up summary of a document's contents rather than using a full-fledged file viewer like those found in competing search tools. The latter helps you avoid opening duplicate files by allowing you to see the contents before opening them.

Unfortunately, support for Blinkx is limited to a 10-question FAQ on the Blinkx site. We wished there were also e-mail or at least a forum available.