I’ve never used Blogdigger until I read this article, but I’m impressed by the way it’s designed.  Blogdigger’s homepage and search results are just as clean and organized as Google.  Below is a screen shot:

If I designed this site, I’d narrow that huge Google Ads script at the top of the search results.

Blogdigger will be making an official announcement soon that SonicMountain, the parent company of Odeo will be acquiring them.  Blogdiggers’s search technology will be integrated into Odeo and the founder/CEO of Blogdigger, Greg Gershman will join Odeo as the VP of Search and Engineering.

Odeo will be relaunching in April.  Odeo searches will use Blogdigger’s technology to search for audio and video files. Blogdigger will run independently and will continue to index blog posts.  Blogdigger started around 2003 and it was one of the first RSS-based blog search engines according to ReadWriteWeb.

The acquisition amount was undisclosed.

Odeo was started by Evan Williams and Noah Glass.  Evan and Noah both started Audioblog and Pyra Labs previously and received funding from Charles River Ventures.  But then Williams bought back Charles River’s equity and revamped Odeo.  About 3 months after Evan Williams wrote in his blog that Odeo was for sale, Sonic Mountain acquired them.  In September 2007, Sonic Mountain also bought FireAnt, a video RSS aggregation media player and website.

On February 20, ODEO wrote on their blog that they were looking for a new home. ODEO was owned by Obvious.com, who are the same creators of Twitter. Since Obvious is focused on Twitter and that company is doing very well, letting go of ODEO was not a very hard decision.

ODEO was acquired by SonicMountain, a New York based startup company. TechCrunch reported that the price was not disclosed, but the amount is above $1 million in cash. The founder of ODEO and Obvious.com, Evan Williams will be working at SonicMountain as an advisor for 6 months.

ODEO has had a rocky past. The company previously raised $5 million in funding from Charles River Ventures and a few other angel investors. After that, Evan Williams didn’t like the idea of having investors, so they bought the company back. The amount that they paid back for the company is rumored to be above the $5 million. Sometimes you make decisions and can’t look back. Congratulations to Obvious.com and SonicMountain.