You know those boxes with funky looking letters that are becoming increasingly common on website registration forms, or on Facebook Pages when you want to post an update? They’re called captchas and they’re used primarily to deter spammers and bots.
One of the biggest providers of the technology is a company called reCAPTCHA, and now, Google owns them. The search giant just announced on their blog that they’re buying reCAPTCHA, which is used on more than 100,000 websites worldwide.
Why exactly does Google want to own this technology? For starters, reCAPTCHA has a unique solution. As Google describes:
“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.”
via http://mashable.com/2009/09/16/google-acquires-recaptcha/

September 16th, 2009
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