blinkx 2.0 analyzes the Web pages, documents, and e-mail messages you view and works busily in the background to locate items that are similar. Before you even think about searching, results are ready. To accomplish this, it indexes blogs, news feeds, Web pages, product listings, video feeds, and your local documents and e-mails. Version 2.0 can also separately search peer-to-peer (P2P) sites for music and other files. Most important, the new Smart Folders feature creates search folders that update themselves automatically with the latest results. This version supports Windows 98, 2000, or XP and works with Internet Explorer and Mozilla-family browsers.

Initially, blinkx indexes your Outlook, Outlook Express, or Eudora e-mail, as well as most text-based file types in the folders you specify. Version 2 indexes JPEG and MP3 metadata as well. You can set it to index in the background (which can take quite a while) or switch to fast indexing, which gets the index initialized quickly but can slow system performance. blinkx's Web index covers over 200 million Web pages, a pittance compared with Google's 8 billion-plus. If you prefer, you can now choose Google or one of half a dozen other engines for ordinary Web searches. blinkx also indexes video news feeds from the BBC, C-SPAN, Fox News, and several other sources. The video indexing relies on speech recognition, so you might expect some mismatches; blinkx's implicit search technology, however, minimizes such errors.

Unlike most toolbars, the blinkx toolbar shows up inconspicuously in the title bar of e-mail, browser, or document windows. Six icons represent the six main content types; initially dim, they brighten up when content of the matching type has been found. Clicking a bright icon displays what blinkx has found, including a snippet of the found items. If any text on the page is highlighted, blinkx will look specifically for items matching the highlighted text.

In addition to searching automatically for items similar to what you're looking at, blinkx offers more traditional keyword-based search. Double-click on its icon and enter your search terms; blinkx starts searching as you type. You can click on icons to limit the local-machine search to specific file types or to items you've viewed recently (Stuff I've Seen). Clicking on the Web-related search icons takes you to the blinkx.com Web site.

You can also go directly to the site to make Web-based searches. A search at www.blinkx.com gets much more than a plain list of results. When possible, the search engine creates a list of "clusters"—concepts found in many of the results—which you can use to refine the search. It also includes a preview of each result when possible, including video feeds. And the Search Visualizer option produces a fascinating—if not entirely useful—3D view of the results, organized by their relationships with each other.

In previews of the coming Longhorn version of Windows, Microsoft has introduced the concept of a Library—a folder-like construct that organizes files by content rather than by location and that automatically updates to include new matching content. Longhorn is still years off, and the initial release won't even include the Windows Future Storage component, which powers the Library concept.

But don't worry; the Smart Folders feature in blinkx 2.0 offers that functionality now. You can define a Smart Folder based on a keyword query, or you can turn an existing folder into a Smart Folder, asking blinkx to use its implicit searching power to find items that are related to the files already in the folder. blinkx updates the folder with shortcuts to local files, e-mail messages, or Web items that match—you can set it to download off-line content automatically. When new matching content appears, blinkx alerts you by changing the folder's icon. You can configure each Smart Folder, specifying which of the content types should be included and spelling out how recent and how relevant items must be.

blinkx's P2P option uses the Gnutella 2 protocol to search for files on a variety of sources, including Gnucleus, Morpheus, and Shareaza. It reports the size of found files as well as the number of available sources, and downloads those you select. Naturally blinkx warns that it cannot be held responsible for content obtained through P2P, and warns that you are responsible for avoiding downloads that violate copyright. As with any P2P system, download availability depends on the supplier. We had little success downloading files found using the P2P search.

blinkx 2.0 is a significant update, with improved functions in many areas, as well as new features. Smart Folders in particular should prove incredibly useful as they keep your most important searches constantly up-to-date. The Web index is still small compared with major search sites like Google and MSN, but it is growing. blinkx is definitely worth a try.