Pico is a small application that lets you navigate the Internet in a new way. As you work, Pico reads your active screen, infers the meaning of what you're looking at, and then retrieves relevant information from across the Web and the other Pico channels. Pico works on all applications that have text including your browser, email and word processing applications."With Pico, we turned the search paradigm on its head, and asked, 'what if search could be brought to you?'" said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CTO of blinkx, the company that developed Pico. "While others, including Microsoft and Apple, have talked about the potential of implicit search before, blinkx has once again pre-empted others by making it reality first. More than anything else, Pico is about the possibility of search-less search."
Pico demonstrates the existence of a Latent Web. While you're doing something on your desktop (reading an email, writing a report or just surfing the web) there's a Web of links that are relevant to what you're doing but, those links are normally latent, hidden from view and difficult to find. Pico works to expose that latent Web by working constantly to make links between your current activity and all that stuff.
The download is just 1MB (that's why the name of the software is Pico)
blinkx also offers Web-based video and podcast search services, desktop search and a service that lets people search for video content and upload results to an iPod or portable video player.
You should also check out Watson, the more established implicit search application from Intellext.
ReplyDeleteAlthough Watson is pretty slow, it has a big plus: integration with desktop search applications, like GDS. All in all, I think it's better than Pico.
ReplyDeleteThese apps lack one fundamental feature: get the context using the search history.
I found many situations when Watson said: "Watson needs more direction".
I have used Blinkx since it it arrived on the scene as a spin out from Autonomy. However the latest upgrade to 4.0.20 (Pico plus desktop search) has been an unhappy experience. Desktop search appears to have lost any form of relevance to the queries made or the text being viewed (or has been severely degraded anyway) and the ability to train Smartfolders on content placed within them has finally been fully removed. Great pity
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