Murdoch in talks to buy graduate's net search engine

NEW YORK - News Corporation, the media giant controlled by Rupert Murdoch, is understood to be seeking to further its ambitions in the internet arena by holding talks to buy an online search engine for video and television clips.

News Corporation's talks with Blinkx, a company that was set up by a Cambridge University graduate and is based in San Francisco, are believed to be at an early stage. Mr Murdoch said when he announced annual results last week that his company was prepared to spend as much as US$2 billion on internet acquisitions.

News Corporation's chief executive and chairman has in recent months made it clear that developing the internet operations of his wide-ranging empire is the key to his future strategy. It is unclear how much News Corporation would pay for Blinkx, which is privately owned.

Acquiring Blinkx, which was founded by Suranga Chandratillake, a Cambridge computer science graduate, would provide search capacity for the Fox internet portal and could give News Corporation an edge in what could be the next big sensation on the web: search engines for finding films, TV episodes and news clips.

Mr Murdoch warned a group of US newspaper editors in a speech in April that they had been "remarkably complacent" about the negative impact of internet use on newspaper circulation and corporate advertising.

"I didn't do as much as I should have after the excitement of the late 1990s," Mr Murdoch said. "I suspect many of you in this room did the same, quietly hoping this thing called the digital revolution would just limp along. Well it hasn't, it won't, and it's a fast-developing reality that we should grab."

News Corporation would not comment on a possible deal with Blinkx, which already uses video clips from Fox News.

Mr Murdoch has not been completely explicit about what type of internet companies he is most interested in snapping up, but he has repeatedly highlighted the potential of matching the volume of content produced by a media company such as his with the possibilities of distributing it via the web.

Mr Murdoch has called the current strategy of most newspapers, which is to regurgitate many of the same articles from print editions on their websites, "bland".

Last month News Corporation, which owns The Times and The Sun, the Fox television network and the Twentieth Century Fox film studio, said it was buying the internet company Intermix Media for US$580m.

Intermix, based in Los Angeles, is the majority owner of MySpace.com, one of the fastest-growing internet sites.

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