New Ways To Search
By Bob Boyles, President
Smarter Distribution

The business of web searching has been dominated by Google for the past 5 years. I remember sitting in a barren office cubicle when someone mentioned that there was this new web site that did web searches. Why would someone create a web site where the only thing you did was search was the first thought I had. The second was, how in the world are you going to make any money providing that kind of service? Fortunately I'm not a venture capitalist and don't have to earn a living by placing bets on those misguided thoughts.

At the time that Google first appeared on the scene there were a number of other search engines attempting to carve out a living in the same market space. However, Google soon squashed them due to two attractive features, no advertising and better search results. Google's use of white space on their web site was something of a novelty at the time it first appeared. Today, numerous companies have attempted to copy their same simple interface and banished overt advertisements to the backwaters of their websites. But what really made Google the clear winner in the search engine war was the quality of the results that they offered. In fact, the quality of Google's results were so good that the company never spent any huge sums of money on marketing, instead word of mouth fueled their growth for the first years of their existence. It wasn't long before Northern Lights was out of business and Yahoo's categories seemed as ancient as the Dewey Decimal System.

Google's search algorithms are still the subject one of the greatest scavenger hunts in all of techdom. The basic idea of Google's ranking has to do with linking. The more sites that link to your site the higher your site is ranked for the key words that the Google spider extracts from the meta tags and image descriptions on your web site. The Stanford grad students that came up with the idea are now literally counting their billions since Google went public with an IPO.

The Great Leap Forward - Today, we may be ready for another leap forward in the area of search engines. The break though is coming from a company called Blinkx. The great leap forward? Blinkx combines web searches with your indexes it builds of files on your own computer. So when I type in "software selection" I not only get links to web sites I also get links to articles on my own computer. What's cool about that? As I move my mouse over the one line summary of the documents I get a popup box that appears and gives me a brief summary of the document. So far the summaries have been highly relevant and time saving.

What's even more cool? Well it's that Blinkx places a small tool bar at the top of every application you open up. Say I'm in the middle of writing a letter to The President of a trade association and I want to look at all of the other documents on my computer that have anything to do with that trade association. I click on the bar and up pops a small window that display's everything from other MS-Word docs that have something to do with that association to MS-Outlook contact entries that work at the same trade association, to web pages that are relevant to the search topic!

In order to do this Blinkx has had to scan the document I'm typing, find the relevant words and the go out and search through its index and display items with similar meaning. The Blinkx toolbar has seven icons on it that allow me to search different things. The "file folder" searches the local hard drive, the "globe" searches the web, the "newspaper" searches news feeds and so on.

Mind Mapping

I used to carry a laptop back in the days when I was a wage slave, I quit when I realized I was becoming more hunch-backed than Tiger Woods' golf caddy. But during those days I thought of my laptop as an extension of my own knowledge, an extended repository for things that I didn't or couldn't keep upstairs in the old gray matter. Today, I'm still playing with Blinkx "Visualizer" feature. Type in "Smarter Distribution and the click the visualizer button and I receive a map of the web site and links to other web sites that are linked to or carry information about Smarter Distribution.

Not Ready For Prime Time?

There are some draw backs to this program. It is only in release 2.0 currently and the drag on your PC's system performance is considerable. So you'd better have some horse power available to run the program and not see any performance hits.

Just as Google was not created in a vacuum and had to beat back its rivals, so too is Blinkx being challenged by other companies. Microsoft (the evil empire of software) has plans to release a similar tool in 2005 that will integrate with their MSN.com desktop. Apple will release their application called "Spotlight" next year also. Google, Yahoo and even Amazon are all working on similar projects. So this is your official notice that the next generation of search tools is on it's way on and you can download the original free, today.

E-Commerce Tool

Aside from being a nice tool to mix the web searches with documents on my own hard drive what relevance does Blinkx have for those of us involved in the e-commerce world? One of the buttons on the Blinkx toolbar is for "product results". Say you're reading an on-line article about some new PC hardware and want to quickly take a look at the prices being offered by several vendors. You can open up another instance of your web browser and type in the catalog number and see what vendors pop-up inter-mingled with other review articles, etc. Or with one click of your mouse from the web browser you can click on the Blinkx shopping icon and display the vendors selling that hardware. At least that's the way it's supposed to work. So if you are involved in e-commerce and want to drive traffic to your website it would be smart to pay attention to Blinkx and how they are going to order their search results and the advertising opportunities that are sure to be available in the near future. This might be a more effective method than paying ridiculous sums of money for banner ads that are difficult to measure in effectiveness.

Summary

You can download Blinkx free from their web site www.blinkx.com. You should set the indexing of your files is set to run over night so as not to degrade system performance.

About Bob Boyles and Smarter Distribution:
Bob Boyles is the principal of Smarter Distribution in Coppell, Texas, a strategic coaching business focusing on assisting distributors in using technology. He is also the author of "Succeeding With Distribution Technology" a practical how-to guide for selecting and implementing the right technology. You may reach him at (972) 304-1180, via e-mail at bob@smarterdistribution.com or on the Web at www.smarterdistribution.com

© Copyright 2003, Robert S. Boyles Jr. All rights reserved. This article cannot be reprinted or reproduced in whole or in part, without the express written permission of Robert S. Boyles Jr.