If you haven’t heard of a desktop search tool called Blinkx, check it out.

Blinkx appears to be much faster and smarter than Google’s desktop search. (I tried it and it did a good job but crashed my PC twice.)

The big incentive to try it was the fact that its creator, Suranga Chandratillake, appears to be of Sri Lankan origin. The other, was a feature called Smart Folders, that is something I have been looking for for a few projects I have in mind.

A few drawbacks right now are the display of the categories of results. Blinkx uses icons for email, web pages,  etc., but displays the file names in very small text. But that could probably be fixed.

Blinkx indexes files in the background, so it is very much an under-the-hood utility. By default, it is set do do its searching only when your computer is idle, so as not to slow it down, but you could also set it to fast, or never.

I find it a great way to search for a article I have previously written, or an email I know i have saved somewhere pertaining to an interview I have conducted. I found another neat feature: the ability to preview the contents of of a PDF in the search box. Blogger, renowned tech journalist and author Om Malik has called Blinkx the ‘Mercedes of desktop search.’