Digital photo manangement company, Picasa acquired

A lot of posturing these days by the big search companies. MSN and Yahoo dropped Google as their search engine this year and has gone with Overture. Earlier this week, Yahoo acquired Oddpost to improve its email service. Today Google bought out Picasa after announcing a partnership with them back in May

Under the Picasa deal, most of Picasa's employees will be hired by Google and relocated to Google's product development center in Santa Monica, Calif., a Google spokesperson said. Google is not disclosing the financial terms.

Picasa's software was initially used by Google to help its blog service. Perusing through the Picasa site briefly shows that the software catalogues and organizes photos. Sounds like this could be a scheme to enhance Gmail or to improve their image search capability.