Google acquires ReCaptcha

Google has acquired ReCaptcha. The exact terms of the deal were not disclosed but it is said that Google plans to use ReCaptcha’s technology both as a security measure on Google sites and also to make its book-scanning project a little smarter.

Here’s why Google’s reason for the acquisition:

“But there’s a twist — the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text.”

Here’s how ReCaptcha can enhance Google’s own projects like Google Books :

“This technology also powers large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search. 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. So we’ll be applying the technology within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process.”

Read more about the acquisition HERE.