How to change blinkx settings

This tutorial provides a step-by-step guide that introduces you to:


Displaying the blinkx settings dialog

In order to change any blinkx settings, you need to display the blinkx settings dialog.

Click on the Settings button on the blinkx search box. The blinkx settings dialog is displayed:





Indexing folders on your computer

blinkx can only search for files on your computer if they are in a folder that you have told blinkx to index. Indexing means that blinkx reads files, so that it can later return them to you as search results.

When you install blinkx, you can specify a folder for indexing but you can later add folders for blinkx to index. You can also remove folders from the indexing list, if you no longer want blinkx to search them.

You are now going to add a folder on your computer for blinkx to index.


  1. Display the blinkx settings dialog.
  2. Click on the Add button underneath the Local folders to index box. A Browse for Folder dialog opens.
  3. Navigate to a folder whose contents you want blinkx to be able to search.
  4. Select the folder and click on OK to close the Browse for Folder dialog.
  5. The folder you have added is now listed in the Local folders to index box:

    blinkx can now index the contents of the folder you have added, so that it can display them as results if they are relevant to one of your desktop searches.

Now you are going to remove the folder you added for the blinkx desktop search again.

  1. In the Local folders to index box, click on the folder you added to select it:

  2. Click on the Remove button underneath the Local folders to index box. The selected folder is removed from the list:

    blinkx can removes the contents of the folder from its index, so that they are no longer available for desktop searches.




Selecting a search engine for web searches

By default any web search that you execute from the blinkx search box is passed on to blinkx broadband, the only search engine that can not only execute simple keyword and Boolean searches but also conceptual search. The advantage of conceptual search is that you can query using ordinary text and find results that are truly relevant to your query, rather than just matching a few of the words you entered.

You can, however, also select another search engine to handle the web searches that you execute.

To change which web search provider blinkx uses:

  1. Display the blinkx settings dialog.
  2. Click on the Change button next to the search engine that you are currently using. A list of available search providers is displayed:

  3. Click on one of the listed search engines to select it. blinkx will now use this search engine when it executes a web search.



Setting which result types the toolbar displays

By default the blinkx toolbar displays the following result types:

Files on your machine

News articles

Web pages

Products

Video clips

Web logs


Now you are going to change which result types the blinkx toolbar displays.

  1. Display the blinkx settings dialog.
  2. Look at the list of result types in the Channel picker box. Currently all result types are selected:

  3. Click on the boxes next to the result types From the Web and Video clips. The check is removed from the boxes:

  4. Open a website (for example, http://news.bbc.co.uk/), and look at the blinkx toolbar:

    Website results and video clip results have been removed from the toolbar.

  5. Return to the blinkx settings dialog, and click on the boxes next to the result types From the Web and Video clips. The boxes become checked again:

  6. Return to the website you opened and wait until the blinkx toolbar reappears. The toolbar once more displays all result types:

    The toolbar displays all result types.


Selecting whether to display adult content

If you want blinkx to display results that contain adult material, check the Show Adult content box. Leave the box empty, if you want blinkx to filter out results that contain adult material. By default the box is not checked.