blinkx Pico : World’s Smallest Search Engine & Desktop Search App
blinkx is working on a new desktop navigation tool dubbed Pico, which is a small application that lets user search the web contextually. Pico reads computer active screens, infers the meaning of what you’re looking at, and then retrieves relevant information from across the Web and the other Pico channels.
At first glance, Pico (which blinkx calls the world’s smallest search engine) sounds like a desktop verison of UCmoreb, which was using similar technology years before contextual search apps became popular.
From blinkx/Pico:
Pico is a 1MB download and, when installed, appears as a series of channels at the top of your desktop, each representing a different type of content: news, blogs, video, Web, Wikipedia, images, and “people”, which retrieves information from online communities, including MySpace.com.
[Pico] works invisibly, so that you only see the results of its search if you click on a relevant channel. Pico does the searching for you, constantly updating its query, based on what’s on your screen at any point in time. 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.”
