In their cod demo, Kwouk and Lynch used Kenjin to scan an email with news of the Tibet buy-out, and find people relevant to the news. Kenjin is fast, if not always totally accurate. It takes up 1.2Mb, works automatically in a small bar at the foot of your screen, and a demo on a standard phone line to an ISP had suggestions coming up within seconds of a Word document being loaded. The software reads documents, finding patterns and boiling them down to algorithms, and then uses these to calculate the probability that two documents are related. This means that format is irrelevant, and that the software can work in any language.
Most search engines rely on keywords, and only scan web pages.
If you choose, it can treat you as a file for comparison. Less convincing was a news article about the problems of British Nuclear Fuels, which led to Salman Rushdie's novel about rock music, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. To be fair, Kenjin only suggested a 38 per cent match. For example, Tesco is producing a customised version for users of its internet service provider. Maybe if you start typing an email about a holiday in the Lake District, a sponsoring retailer can try to sell you fell boots, Lynch said.