Google acquires ReCaptcha as book-scanning aid

With the ReCaptcha acquisition, Google can improve security on its sites and make its book-scanning project smarter.

(Credit: Google)

Google has acquired ReCaptcha, one of those companies behind the distorted text boxes at the bottom of many Web site sign-in pages.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Google plans to use ReCaptcha's technology both as a security measure within certain Google sites and to make its massive book-scanning project a little smarter, the company said in a blog post. ReCaptcha is an offshoot of Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, and puts a twist on the traditional captcha: a string of letters in squiggly text meant to confuse spam bots and other nonhuman Web pests.

The idea behind a captcha is to confuse a computer, but computers are also confused by some words written in fonts used long ago. ReCaptcha offers two words, one of which is a captcha it already knows, and one of which is a word it doesn't know. The thinking is that if you get the first word right, you're likely a human and you're also probably going to get the second one right.

It can then pool all the answers for the second word and declare with a reasonable amount of certainty that the second word is what most people think it is, thereby updating the vocabulary of participating book scanners. This is of obvious interest to Google, currently bent on scanning as many books as it can find.

[transpired]

This article is incredibly poorly written. No reader would understand the link between digitalizing books and the use of ReCaptcha. I had to go to ReCaptcha's website to understand that they are using human's effort int deciphering the "second captcha word" to analyze words that they failed to read from book scanning OCR effort.

[Hunnter2k3]

It isn't poorly written at all, i could understand what it was perfectly.
Seriously, how hard is it to understand those paragraphs??

I thought it was pretty obvious that this was in reference to the fact that Google were scanning books.
And ReCAPTCHA being named the way it was suggests they wanted to recapture something once lost.

Honestly...

[dowell100]

Maybe ReCaptcha can help us keep our eyelids open with a topic like this.

I wasted a perfectly good mouse click to get to this article and the most interesting thing about it was the squabble between you two.

[Renegade Knight]

You forgot to capitalize your name. That's a writing fail right there. Don't blame your inability to understand on a skill you, yourself lack.

[disco-legend-zeke]

Google: All your book are belong to us!

[DustyRomo]

Wow, the Mighty Google machine sucks up another one. Wow, no doubt one day Google will rule the world.

Jess
www.web-privacy.de.tc