Antispam news: Google acquires reCAPTCHA

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http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/...ad-google.html

Google has acquired ReCaptcha which uses a technology that takes scanned words from old books. I think this has less to do with strengthening Google's existing captcha technology (which uses random fonts, words, and colors) but more to do with Google's book scanning/online book library initiatives.

Regardless, using Google's keyword tools or creating accounts will now involve a different process.

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.

For more trends, tips, and news see: http://www.highrevenue.com

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Bump for digital books