Google Acquired reCAPTCHA to Improve Books Scanning Process

Posted by Sierra Monica B. in Internet on 09 18th, 2009 | no responses

According to Google’s blog post, reCAPTCHA has been providing an extra security layer for more than 100,000 web sites, protecting them from spam and fraud.
I’m sure that if you spend a considerable amount on time on the Internet daily you’ve used reCAPTCHA before and the box looks familiar to you already. Well, Google trusted the free anti-bot service and announced acquiring it, including the whole team behind it, to use for its products.

Instead of using it mainly for preventing malicious programs create millions of email accounts for spamming purposes, Google wants to use the technology to improve the scanning process for books and newspapers. reCAPTCHA uses words from scanned archived newspapers and even old books, which are hard to recognize as the papers and ink have degraded in time.
As the user types these in the reCAPTCHA box the computer learn to read this old text.
The technology that converts the scanned images into text is called Optical Character Recognition, and Google Books, as well as Google News Archive Search, involve large-scale text scanning.

The post on Google’s blog was published by Luis von Ahn, co-founder of reCAPTCHA, and Will Cathcart, Google Product Manager.
“That’s why we’re excited to welcome the reCAPTCHA team to Google, and we’re committed to delivering the same high level of performance that websites using reCAPTCHA have come to expect. 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.”