Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to help protect websites from spam and fraud.
The term CAPTCHA refers to “Completely Automatic Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”
ReCAPTCHA provides puzzles, which consist of words with distorted letters that computer users must decipher to register for services online. The words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books that distinguish human visitors to websites from automated intruders.
Google said in a blog post: “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.”
Luis von Ahn, co-founder of reCAPTCHA, said: Google is the best fit for reCAPTCHA. From the very start, people often assumed the project was connected to Google, so it only makes sense that reCAPTCHA ultimately would find a home within Google.
