Google acquires reCAPTCHA

Image courtesy of Google

You know those little fields you have to fill out anytime you want to write a comment on a blog and or social media site? The company that provides those little fields with the squiggly text is reCAPTCHA, and the service helps immensely to help prevent spam. Today Google has announced that they have acquired reCAPTCHA but not only for the spam prevention services they provide but also to apply their technology to Google Books.

The distorted text you see in CAPTCHA text boxes are scanned from old newspapers and magazines, making them very hard for computers to recognize. It is this technology called Optical Character Recognition (OCR), that Google would like to apply to Google Books. Google stated “Improving the availability and accessibility of all the information on the Internet is really important to us, so we’re looking forward to advancing this technology with the reCAPTCHA team.”

Google also plans to use the OCR technology to their news achieves as well. The company hopes to better improve the scanning process of Google Books, and news immensely with reCAPTCHA.

Google Blog

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Tags: Captacha, CAPTCHA, Google, Google aquires reCAPTCHA, Google reCaptcha, recapta, reCAptcha, reCAPTCHAA, reCaptche

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Industry News, Internet Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.