Google Acquires reCAPTCHA to Fight Spam and Improve Google Books OCR
Google just announced that it has acquired reCAPTCHA, one of the leading providers of CPATCHAs, the hard-to-read puzzles you often have to solve before you can sign up for a new web service. Google, of course, isn't so much interested in owning software that can generate CAPTCHAs - that's an easy problem to solve - but is looking at reCAPTCHA as a way to improve the optical character recognition (OCR) software it uses for large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and the Google News Archive Search.
According to Google, reCAPTCHA is currently in use on over 100,000 websites to prevent spam and fraud. the reCAPTCHA team, which is currently based at Carnegie Mellon University, will join Google.
Solving CAPTCHAs to Transcribe Books
We took detailed looks at reCAPTCHA and how it works last September and in early 2007. In short, reCAPTCHA has found a nifty way to crowdsource book transcriptions. When users solve a CAPTCHA through reCAPTCHA, the software will give users two words: one with a known answer (the control word) and one where the OCR software wasn't quite sure what the word was. Once a certain number of users have solved the suspicious word with the same result, it becomes a control word itself and the OCR software can learn this word.
Now, Google will be able to use this same technology to improve its own OCR efforts. Google currently makes over 1 million out-of-copyright books available for download through Google Books and one of the main arguments against these books has been the fact that these texts are not edited and include a lot of OCR errors. With reCAPTCHA, Google could potentially bring the error rate down dramatically and make Google Books even more useful.
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I'm curious about the data these guys have been collecting. Has Google acquired that, too? It wasn't from Google alone, but the New York Times, the Internet Archive, and maybe others.
Good move once again by google
Cool from a machine learning standpoint but does this freak you out since Google could potentially have registration and use data for a huge number of sites around the web that leverage reCAPTCHA? More thoughts here http://bit.ly/ggEWT.
Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant. Google is really amazing on acquiring the right companies for their improvement.
Google really and truly needs to focus on working on the products and services they already have before spending money frivolously in trying to buy up everything. Another microsoft type corporation if the truth is to be told.
I am NOT a fan of reCAPTCHA and I encourage everyone to go read mashable's article titled "Facebook Captcha: What You DON’T Need to Type" and start purposely screwing up the Captchas. Google wanting to digitize and own all books of the world is just NOT a good thing.
And also Captcha's do NOT stop spammers in any way, shape or form, as spammers use program scripts to get around them and spam thousands of sites.
Thank"s
Good move once again by google
Gooooood Thank"s Google is really amazing on acquiring the right companies
Excellent, instead of producing OCR for public domain works available freely for distribution on the Internet Archive, they'll now be working on providing OCR for books only accessible online through Google Books.
God bless capitalism.
Well, It's a great news for the google fans because it help to restrict the spammers and will help to provide clean and good services...
It's a great idea.
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Thank you so much for everything