Slashdot Mirror
Google Buys reCAPTCHA For Better Book Scanning
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."
This should improve Google's indecipherable CAPTCHA.
I agree that the idea is ingenious. But on the only one I ran into, the word was completely indecipherable. I don't mean that it was really hard, I mean that it was a word so thoroughly mangled that it was clearly impossible to read by anyone, especially without context. The lack of context is one of the big weaknesses of the system. When a word is unclear, it's the words around it that give critical clues to what it is.