Blinkx is the creation of Suranga Chandratillake, a 26-year-old computer-science graduate from Cambridge University, who founded the company with Kathy Rittweger, an American technology entrepreneur.

Although, like Google and Yahoo, Blinkx can search the internet, its main strength is its ability to search the user’s desktop for relevant documents, e-mails and other information stored locally.

Desktop search is regarded as the logical next step for search engines. Google, Microsoft and Ask Jeeves are all working on their own projects.

Blinkx claims to have stolen a march on its much bigger competitors. Its search agent, which needs to be downloaded to a PC or laptop, automatically and “invisibly” seeks out information relevant to the document or website that the user is reading.

For example, if you were reading an online news story about Philip Green’s bid for Marks & Spencer, Blinkx might offer up links to the M&S website, to other news stories about the bid, and to analyst notes about M&S that you might have stored on your desktop or in your e-mail folder.

It also provides links to relevant video clips from the BBC website, and to “weblogs” that comment on Green or the bid. It can do this without you having to type in a keyword.

Rittweger said Blinkx had been swamped with offers of venture-capital backing since last month, when the company first started creating a buzz in technology circles.

However, it has already raised £5m from private backers, which will be sufficient for its initial development and marketing needs.

Chandratillake conceded that Blinkx still needed refinement. It has so far indexed only about 60m web pages, compared with the 4.2 billion covered by Google. Some of the links it offers are more curious than useful. For example, if one is interested in Vittorio Colao, the Italian who recently resigned from the board of Vodafone, Blinkx offers links to stories about Inter Milan.

Blinkx is anxious to stress that it is not seeking to compete with Google on keyword web searches, but to find its own niche.

Chandratillake previously spent three years at Autonomy, the Cambridge software company that provides some of the core technology behind Blinkx.

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