MediaFile

Google’s dealmakers sure are busy these days.

On Thursday, the company announced two separate acquisitions, adding Katango and Apture to the Google mix.

Katango, which has developed an algorithm for organizing friends on social networks into different groups, looks like an obvious fit for Google – and indeed rumors of Google’s interest in the start-up surfaced back in September.

From the get-go, Google+ has sought to distinguish itself from Facebook by giving users more control over how they organize and communicate with their contacts, based on the notion that your conversations with work colleagues or family might be quite different from what you talk about with poker buddies.

But manually organizing people into different groups is time consuming. With Katango, Google could remove some of the burden by automatically figuring out which circles your contacts belong in and pre-sorting them for you.

“Google+ is seeing tremendous momentum, so it’s a perfect time to join and make Circles smarter for millions of people,” read a message on the front page of Katango’s website on Thursday, announcing that it was joining Google.

Earlier on Thursday, Google confirmed that it had acquired Apture, which has developed a Web browser extension that lets people find more information about items on Web pages within special windows.

Google didn’t provide the financial terms for either of the deals.

In the first nine months of the year, Google completed a record 57 acquisitions. Judging by Thursday’s double-shot, it doesn’t appear that Google is ready to slow down.