MisterWebNet

Google has bought reCAPTCHA - a captcha service that serves over 200 million captcha's per day. The price paid has not been disclosed.

reCAPTCHA is a spin off from the Carnagie Mellon University in America. It uses captcha's to help webmasters ensure that it is humans accessing their webpages or logging into their websites. Garbled text is displayed to the user and the human can easily recognise it but computers have huge difficulty in doing so.

The twist comes with how reCAPTCHA generates these words. Lesser services create these words at random, or select them from a database. reCAPTCHA uses 'problem' words that could not be recognised from books that are being digitised. After the user identifies these words in its captcha, it can then be inserted back into the digitised version of the book.

Simple, huh?

So what does Google want with fraud prevention?

Google has its own battles ongoing. In its drive to digitize the books and libraries of the world, this service could prove of immense benefit to Google. Even though it only takes a human ten seconds to retype the letters of the captcha display, at current levels of 200 million captcha's per day, that equates to 150,000 man hours. Per day! Thats an awful lot of employees. Google has the capacity to increase this ten fold. Imagine everytime you log on to gmail, your google homepage, youtube or any of the other myriad of Google sites you get served a captcha. Google could very quickly find a relatively cheap way of solving the problem of its OCR (Optical Character Recognition).

Whatever the price of reCAPTCHA was, it was worth it.