Google expands with first UK company

Google has officially made its first ever successful UK venture.

The multimillion dollar company purchased the  mobile visual search startup "Plink" for an undisclosed monetary amount.

According to Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, the company is aiming to acquire at least one new company each month as it expands in this post-recession market.

Plink was founded by PhD students Mark Cummins and James Philbin at the University of Oxford. The first product was PlinkArt, a visual recognition app for mobile that analyses pictures of well-known artworks and paintings and identifies them. Users can then use the app to share the photo with friends and even click through to buy a poster version.

The app was downloaded more than 50,000 times in the six weeks following launch. The two founders will work on Google Goggles, the search giant's visual search project. The acquisition took a total of three months and means that both engineers will have to move to the Google Gears project base in Santa Monica, California.

The app was brought to Google's attention during the Android Develop Challenge, a Google hosted function, in December of last year. The product won $100,000 for their invention-which has been their only funding for production.