Google is at it yet again! The Mountain View monolith has gobbled up its umpteenth start-up - photo analyzing city guide app JetPac being the latest. 

While the amount is not yet disclosed, this move by the search giant may shed some light into the future plans of the company. What is interesting is that the news comes in a few days after suggestions that Google would flip out its Google+ Photo services into a standalone app.

Along with the app, that Google would have been interested in the team behind JetPac, thus giving it access to the already existing knowledge and gaining an upper hand over the rivals.

What Is JetPac

In 2011 Pete Warden, who was an engineer for Apple for five years, founded the company and the next year it secured a $2.4 million in funding, largely from Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and Khosla Ventures.

Jetpac is an app that scans publicly available photos from Instagram, and creates city guides based on the photos. Currently, Jetpac has city guides for around 6,000 cities.

How Google Can Use It

Integration into Maps: By the integrating JetPac features into its already existing Google Maps it would further strengthen its database. At present Google’s collection of images on Maps is very limited and this integration means that it will be sitting on a treasure chest, with images from some of the remotest parts of the world and different images of the same place.

An addition to Google+: For some time now Google has been struggling to improve its Google+’s popularity, but in vain. The company might give another shot at reviving its ailing social network by the smartly integrating JetPac into the proposed standalone photo app, which according to rumors will arrive soon.

Strengthen it as a travel site: Over the past couple of years, Google has already shown interests in transforming itself into a travel site. It already has Google Flights and this acquisition could give people the city guides, by collecting the images from across the world.

This year, Google has been on a buying spree and has spent roughly $4.2 billion. It has acquired smartphone video creation platform Directr and game streaming service Twitch by YouTube earlier, and digital assistant messaging application, Emu.

The company also snapped up a handful of tech security startups, Israel’s smart identification technology SlickLogin, along with fraud and spam security startup Imperium in January.

Taking over is always easy, but integrating them smartly into the existing platform is important. Knowing Google they might do it well. While all these latest acquisitions are from different sections, are these pointing at the future plans of Google? We will have to wait and watch.

Tags : Google, Google+, JetPac