Google announced that it has acquired Polar, a startup company that specializes in online polls, in a move that looks to give a boost to the Google+ social network.
The acquisition shows that Google has not given up on Google+ and is still making investments to improve it.
The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Polar, which was only founded last year, creates polls for users to answer on their tablets and smartphones. The polls lets users choose only between two options, but the startup has already released over half a billion polls over the past eight months, with active voters reaching 1.1 million in September.
According to a blog post by Polar founder Luke Wroblewski, one of out every 449 users of the Internet has voted on a poll by Polar.
The team of Polar will be working on the Google+ social network that has not gained enough traction to challenge rival Facebook, which currently has over a billion active users and is the largest social network in the world.
In comparison, Google reported last October that there are 300 million users on Google+ that are termed as "in-stream," or those that are still active in viewing the main news page of the network or the user's personal feed.
However, despite the struggles, Google+ retains its value with Google because the social network allows the company to learn more about Google users.
Google said that it will shutter support of the service by the end of 2014.
"I'm thrilled to welcome Luke Wroblewski and the talented Polar team to Google! They'll be joining our team and helping us make G+ even more awesome," said Google+ vice president for engineering Dave Besbris on his own Google+ account.
Wroblewski, the former chief design architect of Yahoo and a Benchmark venture capital company entrepreneur in residence, is also the author of Mobile First, a book that explains why websites and apps should now be designed with mobile first in mind and discusses the methods through which web designers can move from designing applications for desktop and laptop computers to designing applications for mobile devices.
Wroblewski also said in his blog post that Polar packaged all the articles that he wrote in the past couple of years regarding the mobile and multi-device designs of Polar into an iBook, a PDF file, and in the original pages of the website. In addition, Polar also archived all the polls and data that the users of Polar have created.
