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Blinkx takes into account the entire text

"Most search-engine technology is based on the keyword," company co-founder Suranga Chandratillake said. "What's different with Blinkx is we take into account the entire text."

The future of search lies instead with bigger concepts. Blinkx, which last month quietly launched a beta of its desktop search application, is getting ready to take on the increasingly competitive Web search market. On Friday, it plans to formally launch the company and its new approach to search.

Blinkx, which installs its own search client and mini toolbars within Windows applications, distills large amounts of text—from Word documents, Web pages or e-mails—into concepts in order to retrieve search results, its founders told eWEEK.com.

Based in London and San Francisco, the company bases its search results on its own Web index, which stands at about 65 million pages, almost 40,000 news sources and thousands of Web logs. It also scours a user's hard drive to find relevant e-mails and files, supporting more than 200 formats.

Chandratillake started the company with co-founder Kathy Rittweger. Chandratillake's background includes three years as the chief technology officer at enterprise software company Autonomy Corp., while Rittweger was one of the early employees of now-defunct Web personalization company Firefly.

Blinkx joins a growing array of new search companies taking on major players such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., but it is one of the few to build its own Web index. Others such as Vivisimo Inc. and Groxis Inc.'s Grokker have focused on new approaches for displaying and sorting through results from the major engines.

By also concentrating on the desktop, Blinkx also will be squaring off against the large search engines. Google reportedly is working on a broader desktop search tool, while Microsoft Corp.'s MSN division and Ask Jeeves Inc. both recently bought small desktop search companies and are likely to integrate the new technology into their search offerings.

At its heart, Blinkx uses what it calls "self-learning" algorithms in order to figure out the context of what a user is reading and to initiate searches in the background.

Results are then available when users scroll over a toolbar that appears in the upper, right-hand corner of Windows applications such as Internet Explorer, Outlook and Microsoft Office applications. The toolbar displays six icons that represent results from the Web, news sites, blogs, video and audio sources, the local hard drive, and related products.

Users can initiate their own searches from the Blinkx application, with results displaying as a user types.

To co-founder Kathy Rittweger, Blinkx's approach changes the dynamics of Web and desktop search by allowing results and information to flow to users as they read and work.

"The whole idea behind Blinkx is to provide information in the most non-distracting way," she said.

Blinkx is available as a free download and requires Windows 2000 or XP as well as Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher. The business model for the 10-person company is to earn revenue from affiliate relationships and advertising.

Already Blinkx includes product search results in its toolbar that displays related Amazon.com books. The company plans to expand such product searches and consider search-based advertising, Rittweger said.

Source: eWeek.com

Netscape advertising case settled by Playboy

A week after an appeals court ruling revived a Playboy Enterprises Inc. trademark infringement lawsuit against Netscape Communications Inc., the companies have reached a settlement in the case.

On Friday, a spokesman for Netscape parent America Online Inc. and the attorney representing Playboy confirmed that a settlement had been reached in recent days but declined to discuss the terms of the settlement.

Chicago-based Playboy had sued Netscape for linking to advertisements of its competitors when users entered words such as "playboy" and "playmate" in search engines. Playboy had claimed that the practice, known as "keying," damaged its brand because its trademarks were associated with other products.

Last week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reversed a district court's 2002 dismissal of the suit, allowing it to head to trial. But this week's settlement puts an end to the case, which has been closely watched in the search engine advertising field.

While the Playboy case dealt specifically with banner ads triggered by keywords, it is likely to have a bearing on other cases that involve the use of specific words to launch search engine advertising, said Robert Andris, a partner at Ropers, Majeski, Kohn & Bentley LLP, in Redwood City, Calif.

Keyword-base advertising has become big business for search engines such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) subsidiary Overture, that let advertisers bid on terms that return paid search listings.

Google, of Mountain View, Calif., already has faced legal challenges over its keyword-based ad service, AdWords. It is embroiled in a lawsuit with Luis Vuitton SA regarding keyword-based ads. And in November, Google asked for a California court's ruling to back its trademark policy for AdWords after facing the threat of a lawsuit from American Blind & Wallpaper Factory Inc.

Andris, who was not involved in the Playboy case, said that a settlement was likely Netscape's best option following the Ninth Circuit's decision. Netscape could have appealed the ruling further to the U.S. Supreme Court or gone to trial, but both options can be expensive and difficult to win, Andris said.

"There really are only a couple places that the losing party can go if it doesn't agree with result," Andris said.

Source: Yahoo News