Google announced this morning they will be acquiring reCAPTCHA.
It’s an interesting acquisition however it really makes a lot of sense. One of the original reasons (if not the original reason) CAPTCHA was developed was to ensure the person on your website or application was in fact human. This was because BOTS would crawl through the internet and create posts and forum topics etc.. in order to distribute SPAM and BOTS across websites. CAPTCHA would step in here by displaying an image which only a human could decipher (normally) and then ask them to type in a word or several words to ensure they were HUMAN.
This is where the brilliance of this acquisition from Google comes in. As people are typing out these CAPTCHA images to register on Facebook or create a GMAIL account etc.., reCAPTCHA can display old news papers and books which need to be converted to text essentially getting a free workforce to do this easy but labor intensive work done for the company that hires reCAPTCHA! Since Google has been in the business to INDEX the world including old Books and Magazines, they now will have access to a FREE workforce to help translate and perfect it’s OCR technology. Like I said, brilliant.
Teaching computers to read [via Google Blogs]
Wow that really is brilliant, for two reasons.
1. That they were able to convert scanned images from old literature into captcha text.
2. They’ll get people to convert it to type for free by doing something nearly every site out there requires now.
@bookwormJR,
Exactly – the reCAPTCHA site has some good info on it regarding the mass scale of CAPTCHA today – http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html
Here’s a excerpt which details the shear scale of CAPTCHA and the possible workforce available for these puzzles / translation:
Aye… pretty smart. I think I want some cash out of the deal if I’m gonna be doing OCR for them!
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