Blinkx, the internet search engine company, has made a strong stock market debut, its shares surging nearly 40 per cent, underlining the current appetite for online assets.

The new company, created in part from the consumer arm of Autonomy, the Cambridge-based software group, runs a search engine that specialises in finding online video clips. The float is among the first in the nascent online video search sector.

Shares in Blinkx, which does not expect to post a profit this year, were priced at 45p, at the top of the indicated range, to raise £25 million. The stock surged to 62p on the junior AIM market in early deals, valuing the company at about £170 million.

The strong performance comes amid a land-grab for a relatively small pool of quality internet assets.

Most recently, Microsoft agreed to buy aQuantive, the online advertising group, for $6 billion (£3 billion), an 85 per cent premium to its previous stock market value. That deal followed a month-long spree of major acquisitions by Google, Yahoo! and WPP.

Blinkx was originally a privately-owned company set up in the US by a former Autonomy executive. Before today's float, Autonomy exercised an option to buy 90 per cent of Blinkx and merged it with its own consumer arm.

The new group has a five-year exclusive licence to use Autonomy’s IDOL software, which underpins its video search engine. However, that deal excludes China.

Blinkx’s main website, Blinkx.com, claims to be the world’s largest video search engine. It processed about 1.1 million searches a day last month and is estimated to have about 700,000 daily users.

However, three years after being founded, Blinkx remains a minnow compared with rivals such as YouTube, the largest video-sharing site, which downloads more than 100 million video clips a day. YouTube was launched two years ago and was bought by Google for $1.65 billion in October.

Mike Lynch, Autonomy’s chief executive, said last month that the demerger would help his company to focus on its commercial software business. A previous effort to enter the consumer sector failed when Autonomy was outmuscled by Google and Yahoo! in 2000. It tried again in 2005 in China with the launch of a joint venture, OpenV.

Autonomy invested about $165 million (£83 million) in IDOL and will keep 10 per cent of the new company, which plans to make money through interactive advertisements attached to video clips.

Blinkx will also offer broadband television services and explore “transaction hijacking”, where consumers buying items online are automatically informed, during their transaction, if a better price is offered elsewhere.

Cisco, the internet hardware group, has estimated that online video technologies will be worth $20 billion.

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