Today's computer hard drives look a lot like the Web: huge, cluttered collections of content that can make it nearly impossible to find a file manually. So it's no surprise that Web-search giants like Google and Yahoo are competing to make the best hard-drive search engine. Attempting to keep up in this race to conquer what's known as "desktop search" is Blinkx of San Francisco. The startup's software turns search on its head: instead of waiting for the user to type keywords in a query box, the software monitors what the user is working on and automatically supplies links to relevant content from the local hard drive and the Web.

The race heated up in October with the release of Google's desktop search engine. Since then, MSN, Ask Jeeves, and Yahoo have come out with competing products. But even last summer, Blinkx had its software ready to download. It has since accumulated a million active users.