Google Acquires Photo Search Startup Plink

Google has acquired UK-based mobile photo search startup Plink for an undisclosed amount.

The company’s sole product Plink Art is an Android application that allows you to look up information about a piece of art by simply photographing it with your phone.

The application was one of the winners of Android Developer Challenge 2, scoring a $100,000 prize for winning in the “Education/Reference” category.

Remind you anything?

Artwork recognition is one of the features offered by Google Goggles, which is what Plink’s founders will be working on at Google.

Since the Plink only has 50,000 users, this is mostly a talent acquisition to improve Google’s visual search technologies.

The announcement posted to Plink’s blog gives a glimpse into where Google would like to go with visual search:

The visual search engines of today can do some pretty cool things, but they still have a long long way to go. We’re 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. There are beautiful things to be done with computer vision – it’s going to be a lot of fun!

Imagine a world where you can “Google” information about anything by aiming your cell phone at it and snapping a picture.