Rupert Murdoch Wants The Blinkx Search Engine

Rupert Murdoch Wants The Blinkx Search Engine

According to the LA Times, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp is in negotiations to buy the Blinkx search engine. LA Times reports “News Corp. is in negotiations to buy Blinkx, a privately held Internet search company based in San Francisco, according to people close to the world’s fourth-largest media giant. The prospective acquisition of Blinkx is part of an aggressive bid by News Corp. to take on such Internet powerhouses as Yahoo Inc. News Corp. is trying to build a rival portal by acquiring fast-growing Web businesses and by leveraging the sites of its in-house brands, including those of local Fox TV stations, the Fox TV network and cable channels such as Fox Sports and Fox News.”

The move makes absolute sense because Blinkx has just what News Corp may be looking for in a search engine – extended multimedia search. Blinkx searches video feeds, TV episodes, news, and even uses speech recognition technology to index the audio of its indexed clips. In addition to its multimedia search, at Blinkx.TV, Blinkx also offers a desktop search tool which “reads what you have on your computer screen and automatically links you to related information – Web sites, the latest news on the Web, even documents and e-mails on your own computer.”

I followed the link on the LA Times story from Lee Odden’s Online Marketing Blog. Good old Lee rubbed it in a bit that in the Search Engine Journal piece from earlier this morning “What Search Engine is Rupert Murdoch Buying?” I neglacted to mention Blinkx and put my money on LookSmart : “Search Engine Journal speculated this morning that potential targets might be Looksmart, Mamma, Technorati or Gigablast. Blinkx was not on that list.” Ouch, thanks for the nod Lee!