Om Malik praises the new contextual desktop search tool called Blinkx, which is currently available in a downloadable beta client as well as a web only interface.

Om goes on to cite some attractive examples such as…

“BlinkX is all about contextual search…Say you are reading through a big Microsoft Word document… the BlinkX bar at the top of the page, will retrieve relevant news item links with brief summaries… The software basically reads the entire document and builds a contextual link database on the fly.”

There’s certainly a tremendous buzz in the desktop/personal search category, with the likes of MSFT, Google, Ask Jeeves and many others all gunning for the space.

I’m not sure where it’s all going, but for me it’s great because I’m a sucker to test these tools. I currently have X1, Grokker 2, Lookout and now Blinkx installed on my system.

So far, Lookout is the one I use almost exclusively. Due in part to its focus on searching Outlook, but I also found its interface and indexer to be unobtrusive. Oh and it’s very fast!

Although, after only a few minutes of using BlinkX, I can see how the contextual search feature is addictive (whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know).

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