Blinkx

John Battelle points to a review of an intriguing new tool called Blinkx.

BlinkX is all about contextual search. Say you are reading through a big Microsoft Word document, on I don’t know European Union policies on data transfer, the BlinkX bar at the top of the page, will retrieve relevant news item links with brief summaries (only visible when a mouse moves over the link) and other important links. It can do the same for a web page you are reading. For instance, if you were reading my piece on Cisco buying Procket, you would get links to all relevant news articles on the web, and links to Cisco and Procket homepages. However, the fun begins when you open the client software (which sits in the system tray.) It has a simple entry window. Lets say you put Napa and Sonoma County. It searches and brings back the web for news, Amazon for books, websites of relevance, e-commerce links and but more importantly any documents, emails etc related to that subject on your desktop.

Very interesting idea if it actually works. A desktop search, hidden web search, and context-based personalized search, all in one. Perhaps the future of desktop search?

Update: Emergic.org posts about a Linux tool called Dashboard that

constantly combs through your e-mail, calendar, address book, word-processing, and browser programs and brings together information related to your current tasks before you even know you want it. Say you're reading an e-mail from a collaborator on a project. Dashboard automatically shows the person's contact information, her last five e-mails, and your upcoming appointments with her.

And Microsoft has announced a similar effort called Implicit Query.