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Google Acquires Web Security Firm reCAPTCHA
Tags: CAPTCHA, Google, Google Acquires CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA
Google Acquires reCAPTCHA. It provides CAPTCHAs to over 100,000 sites on the web. CAPTCHA is seen when you are signing up for services or buying products online and guards against spam. Google will use reCAPTCHA to detect fraud or spam. It will also help Google to improve the quality of its book- and newspaper-scanning project.
Luis von Ahn, co-founder of reCAPTCHA, and Will Cathcart, Google Product Manager explain:
Since computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain millions of email accounts for spamming. But there’s a twist — the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text.
In this way, reCAPTCHA’s unique technology improves the process that converts scanned images into plain text, known as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This technology also powers large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search. Having the text version of documents is important because plain text can be searched, easily rendered on mobile devices and displayed to visually impaired users. So we’ll be applying the technology within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process.
