Google Buys reCAPTCHA For Better Book Scanning

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday September 17, 2009 @02:06AM 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."

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Re:Won't this eventually defeat the purpose? by slim · 2009-09-17 02:54 · 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.