I've gotten a fairly large number of e-mails from readers who seem to very happy wit the just-released Blinkx 2.0 beta. The two favorite features are the Search Folders and SIS (Stuff I've Seen) which provides a crumb trail that allows you to backtrack what you've been looking at online. Both are true innovations that set Blinkx apart from the currently available competition.

My reaction to the new Blinkx is not quite so positive - sorry to say. Despite the reports from a number of readers about how "light" Blinkx 2.0 is, I found it to be rather slow, especially when performing the initial indexing of my system where it brought my machine to a crawl and took hours to index my files and Outlook mail. I'm sorry but in this day and age, I don't think a search package should say that you need to leave it running overnight to perform the initial indexing.

More irritating is the lack of controls in the program. Building a specific list of folders I wanted indexed requires either typing out path statements or browsing to each folder location to populate a list. There's no way to make an exception of a nested folder if I want everything else in that folder indexed. Using the increasingly standard tree view could easily solve these issues.

Worse, there is no control over how Blinkx works (or fails to work) with a proxy. We have two proxies at my company. One requires authentication, the other does not. In the absence of any Blinkx preferences for selecting which proxy I want/need to use, I have to remember which proxy I have Internet Explorer set to use to figure out why Blinkx complains that it is off line and the little toolbar it adds to browser and e-mail windows only shows local results.

For a search tool whose core benefit is searching online, in real time, for relevant items in the context of the text I've selected, this lack of control is a major oversight and one I hope the company corrects. The premise of 2.0 is exciting and it works pretty well when I can connect but it's not a tool I can recommend for folks who work behind a corporate firewall or proxy server just yet.

To the company's credit, they provide an opportunity to give feedback during the uninstall of Blinkx and I received a personal response from one of their technical support team addressing my concerns. That's a very good sign that the company recognizes the importance of listening to their users and evaluators and I've had similar experiences with the folks at Copernic and x1.

So for now, I'll keep Blinkx in the "worth watching" category to see how their developments continue. But I'll continue to rely on x1 to find my stuff.