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September 16, 2009
Google Acquires reCAPTCHA; Plans to Use Technology for Books and Archives
If you've ever had to type in a bunch of funny looking letters and/or numbers when registering for a site or making a purchase online, then you've experienced CAPTCHA. Google has now acquired reCAPTCHA, a provider of the secure measure.
What sets reCAPTCHA apart from other providers is that it uses scanned archives to provide the funny looking text. reCAPTCHA then uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert the scan to text.
Google plans to harness the technology for its Google Books and Google News Archive Search.
Posted by Nathania Johnson on September 16, 2009 2:01 PM
Comments
great move taken by Google once again
Sean September 16, 2009 2:26 PM
See, but that's not what reCAPTCHA really does. The point of reCAPTCHA is to have a human type in the words that OCR cannot read by dividing the workload up into lots of small pieces. Read this: http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html
Dean Putney September 16, 2009 2:53 PM
Cool from a machine learning standpoint but does this freak you out since Google could potentially have registration and use data for a huge number of sites around the web that leverage reCAPTCHA? More thoughts here http://bit.ly/ggEWT.
Alex Hawkinson September 16, 2009 3:08 PM
Google really and truly needs to focus on working on the products and services they already have before spending money frivolously in trying to buy up everything. Another microsoft type corporation if the truth is to be told.
I am NOT a fan of reCAPTCHA and I encourage everyone to go read mashable's article titled "Facebook Captcha: What You DON’T Need to Type" and start purposely screwing up the Captchas. Google wanting to digitize and own all books of the world is just NOT a good thing.
And also Captcha's do NOT stop spammers in any way, shape or form, as spammers use program scripts to get around them and spam thousands of sites.
cb on bonanzle September 17, 2009 12:16 AM
This will help to keep away spam and other automated software from than 100,000 websites as those websites have now Google powered CAPTCHA technology.
surinder sharma September 18, 2009 2:02 AM
