San Francisco-based search engine firm blinkx has launched what it calls an entirely new way to navigate Web 2.0. blinkx calls today’s search process (read: Google) as a “disruptive experience -- users are forced to interrupt the activity they have at hand, go to a search engine, enter a search and examine the results for relevant material.”

Doesn’t sound to disruptive to me unless I’m surfing with my 1-month old on my lap and she vomits all over my keyboard (don’t you dare laugh!). Anyhow getting back to the pain and disruption of using Google, web and intranet users are now encouraged to download and use blinkx new Pico search engine, a free 1MB download (see www.blinkx.com).

Pico appears as “an unobtrusive series of channels at the top of your desktop, each representing a different type of content: news, blogs, video, Web, Wikipedia, images, shopping, and "people", which retrieves information from online communities, including MySpace.com.”

The Pico program sits on top of your operating software and reads your screen – whether its browsers, Word documents, or something else – and infers meaning and context from each. This is what has been referred to for years as an inference engine – something that Autonomy has been touting in form or another for years. Another related label is the dynamic composite applications. Dynamic composite applications can automatically respond to unknown needs such as a user ‘search’ request. They identify the relevant enterprise systems and applications on the fly and interact with them, effectively instructing them to deliver precise ‘slices’ of information that match each user’s specific needs. Users receive the personalized view of information they need without requiring any additional work on the part of the administrator. This is of particular importance inside the enterprise at the intranet level as so many of us knowledge workers are using so many tools and systems (browser, Notes, Outlook, MS-Word, MS-Excel, PDFs, etc.).

In addition to adding meaning or context to this information, an engine like Pico will then dynamically retrieve other relevant information from across the Web. Where Pico stands out in a burgeoning crowd is that it includes social media such as blogs, wikis, multimedia, social bookmarks, and even MySpace.com. Pico “does the searching for you, constantly updating its query, based on what's on your screen at any point in time.”

The user can then configure Pico folders called Smart Folders based on the content you’re reading – save what you’re reading or writing as a search and it will automatically populate your folders as well a single consolidated view. This is not too dissimilar but a step beyond what Google Sidebar does which is serve up relevant content based on the users needs.

Intranet example

A large engineering company was growing fast and had so many projects in the works that it was increasingly impossible for its employees to find and share the project information they needed to do their jobs well. They discovered that employees were spending a great deal of time re-creating analysis and re-doing work that had already been done elsewhere in the company.

For example, the company discovered that engineers on one project would often re-create engineering analyses and proposals that had already been done for another project, wasting time and money. Furthermore, account managers had no central place to quickly access necessary information for clients.

The company used traditional text-based search to try to retrieve information across the enterprise, but at best it picked out only keywords from documents and tended to produce either very wide or very narrow results. Furthermore the engineers felt that looking through long lists of documents wasn't really helping them find what they needed.

When introduced to dynamic composite application or an inference engine, this company immediately saw that they could streamline project delivery processes, and eliminate much of the redundancy that was costing them time and money. Using an engine such as technology by Blanketware Corporation’s Instant Workplace, they could create a project-specific workplace for each client complete with proposals, contracts, specs, tools, discussion groups, contact information, account reports, project plans and other information from across their disparate web-facing enterprise systems. Furthermore, when integrated with the profiling functionality of their portal, they could deliver different workplaces to a project manager and an account manager, even if they entered the same search query.

Dynamic application technology provides employees much better access to the broad range of relevant information they need to do their jobs well– be they customer service, project management, human resources, corporate management, etc. As a result, employees work faster and with higher quality, spend less time looking for information, and more time helping to keep their company ahead of the competition.

This is the space Pico has jumped into – not a new space, but an emerging one (see Carmine Porco’s Search Engines Don't Suck Part I).

RELATED ITEMS:

No Silver Bullet for Knowledge Management

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media