Talk about acquisitions that don’t make much sense in the beginning but eventually pan out just fine, they usually end up sounding like a modern day fairy tale to me. Thankfully I snap out in time out of my fantasy ride and relay the news that Google has added another one to its kitty of acquisitions.
Google just announced that it has acquired Spam protection tool Re-Captcha.
We tried to make it hard for computers to recognize because we wanted to give humans the scoop first, but we’re happy to announce to everybody now that Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to help protect more than 100,000 websites from spam and fraud.
says their blog post penned (or typed perhaps) by Luis von Ahn, co-founder of reCAPTCHA, and Will Cathcart, Google Product Manager.
reCaptcha for those who don’t know is the same service that makes you type funny sets of words while commenting or using services of many sites, say adding friends through an unverified Facebook account. It is essentially a free service and is used on a lot of applications including plugins, CMS, SNS, etc.
So why did Google shell out any money if at all for a service that clearly seems to have no particular intention of making money?
For one Google can just showcase its superhuman power by getting the biggest spam fighter in its armory. More importantly it is the technology that reCaptcha has developed to build its spam fighting skills that Google is after. reCaptcha digitizes old books and newspapers to create words that then act as a spam block. They explain the whole process in detail on their current website with better examples. It essentially revolves around scanning these documents and using OCR transcription to convert it into plain text. Sounds very similar to something else you have read about doesn’t it?
Yes Google books.
reCaptcha’s technology will now power book scanning and newspaper scanning and conversion to plain text to power Google Books and Google News Archives Search. Who would have thought!
Having the text version of documents is important because plain text can be searched, easily rendered on mobile devices and displayed to visually impaired users, adds Google in their announcement. All in all an excellent example of innovation given its due however unexpected.
Though one does wonder if it will have any particular bearing on the websites that currently use reCaptcha’s technology.
Google is helping us receive all the services at free of cost
good move !
Interesting article!
This technology will help to keep away spam and other automated software from than 100,000 websites as those websites have now Google powered CAPTCHA technology.
I feel irritated with this stupid captcha things.