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Google Buys reCAPTCHA For Better Book Scanning

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the when-spammers-give-you-lemons dept.

TimmyC writes "This story may interest the Slashdot folk, many of whom use the reCAPTCHA anti-spam service. Well, reCAPTCHA is now owned by Google. Apparently, what attracted Google to ReCAPTCHA is that the company has linked its core authentication service with efforts to digitize print books and periodicals. The search giant has a massive (and controversial) effort underway in that area for its Google Books and Google News Archive services. Every time people solve a CAPTCHA from the company, they are also, as a byproduct, helping to turn scanned words into plain text that can be indexed and made searchable by search engines. Interesting times indeed."

4 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Why just words? by Thanshin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I suppose most people write fast enough to allow sentence captchas already.

    1. Re:Why just words? by Canazza · · Score: 4, Insightful

      no they don't. I was transfering flights at London Heathrow and there was only one window open, and a massive queue. I get to the front and I find the woman at the computer used one finger typing... ONE FINGER, not even one on each hand, one feking finger. This was someone who was supposedly trained to do this job, can't even touch type.
      I know alot of people who still have to look at the keys when they type, and while it's generally faster than that bint, it's still painfully slow.
      Not to mention Children, when it comes to touch typing, kids can be fast learners, but before they get the hang of it, they can be very slow too.

      --
      It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
  2. Re:WTF Summary by iamhassi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. "

    That explains why half the time I can't even read the word. I swear every time I reach a captcha I have to refresh it 5x before I finally land on two words I can read.

    I must say this system is ingenious. Distributed OCR: let millions of internet users figure out what the words are. Maybe next election when there's hanging chads they can use that as a captcha.

    --
    my karma will be here long after I'm gone
  3. Re:Won't this eventually defeat the purpose? by slim · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What you get in the capcha is the scanned word, plus some warping and obfuscation. Therefore if OCR advances to the point where it has no trouble with the original scan, it would still have trouble with the capcha.

    Spammers already have a neat way around capchas -- they proxy them to people on porn and warez sites. If you ever fill in a capcha on such a site, you're probably helping a spambot out.