Mountain View, California — Google has snapped up another company this month to its shopping cart, and this time it is U.K.-based Plink, which will help beef-up its visual search capabilities. The search engine titan early this week has acquired Plink, the owner of PlinkArt, a visual-search engine that uses pictures to help users look for content on the Web.
In keeping with Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s last year promise that Google is aiming to acquire at least one company each month, and further enlist more staff – as it expands its previously rapid rate of acquisitions, and Plink is Google’s first-ever acquisition in the UK.
Plink, a four months old U.K.-based start-up was established to extend an Android application called PlinkArt that allows users to identify photographed artwork through visual search technology. PlinkArt’s capability to distinguish artwork banks on whether the captured image can be matched to one of the tens of thousands of famous paintings in the application’s database.
Established by two British PhD students Mark Cummins and James Philbin, Plink’s initial product was PlinkArt, a visual identification app for mobile that examines pictures of well-known artworks and paintings and identifies them. Users can then circulate the photo with friends and also click through to buy a poster version.
In a blog post Monday, Plink co-founders Cummins and Philbin announced the deal as “exciting news,” especially for a company that only went public four months ago.
The makers claim that PlinkArt seemed to hit it big with Android users, with Plink claiming more than 50,000 downloads of the app in just six weeks following launch, and Plink have also held talks with galleries including the Tate over possible partnerships.
PlinkArt replicates some of the functionality of Google Goggles, a technology that Google introduced last December that can generate search queries from images of objects, such as landmarks, works of art, products, and bar codes.
“The visual search engines of today can perform some pretty cool things, but they still have a long, long way to go,” said Plink co-founders Cummins and Philbin in a blog post. “We are looking forward to helping the Goggles team build a visual search engine that works not just for paintings or book covers, but for everything you see around you.”
Although it sounds pretty unusual that Google would acquire a mobile-app developer, the company did so for Plink’s technology. Visual search is quickly becoming a highly sought after part of the search market, enabling users to search the Web through the help of images, rather than text. Google’s investment in visual search technology reflects the company’s desire to broaden its search business beyond the text ads that still represent most of the company’s revenue.
The duo, who founded Plink while studying at the University of Oxford’s mobile robotics and visual geometry groups in the department of engineering, said they will work on Google’s new “Google Goggles” project, which empowers mobile users to search the internet using photos rather than words.
“It is time to be much more optimistic about the European tech startup scene,” said Anil Hansjee, Google’s head of corporate development for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
“There is a lot of innovation here and now the tech eco-system across academia, corporates, startups, venture capital, and government is responding and supporting this effort.”
Plink won a $100,000 prize from Google last year after being selected as the best reference app for Google Android mobile phones.
Hansjee said despite being an early stage company, Plink had “taken advantage of many of the ecosystem’s offerings” to establish itself.
The acquisition took just three months and will mean that both engineers move to the Google Gears project base in Santa Monica, California. The pair were unable to say how much product development would continue for PlinkArt, including an iPhone app, saying that all their new features and development work would be appearing in new Google products.
Visual search has a long way to go before it can uproot text-based searching, but watch that space going forward. With improvements, it could change the way we interact with search engines.
Details of the acquisition, including the purchase price, were not released.