Etsy buys Blackbird Technologies to bring AI to its search

It's not just gigantic search engines that are looking to acquire tech and talent around emerging areas like speech recognition. Even design and craft marketplaces can use a little machine learning and artificial intelligence to make their wheels turn a little better. Today, the popular handmade-goods site Etsy announced it has acquired a startup called Blackbird Technologies, which has developed algorithms that can help Etsy develop better and more advanced search with features like natural language processing, image recognition and analytics. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but we're asking and will update if we learn more. The company's employees -- it appears there were around 10 -- will all be joining Etsy.