Breaking news: Google Buys reCAPTCHA

Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides visual security codes for protecting more than million websites from spam and fraud. Yes, reCAPTCHA are the ones who make those boxes with squiggly letters that are required to be entered.

In its official blog, Google said that the acquisition was intended to use ReCaptcha's technology as a security measure in Google entities. Apart from that, ReCaptcha's expertise will also be used for Optical Character Recognition technique for their book-scanning project.

ReCaptcha is a company from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science that works towards twisting two words in order to confuse spam bots and scripts from spamming websites. ReCaptcha uses anOCR Software that can read passages from news clips, old books and articles which make Google much interested. Hackers use the same software to get through CAPTCHAs.

However, the reCAPTCHA software itself isn't perfect and a hacker group dubbed Anonymous had used brute forcing/guessing algorithm to crack it.

Currently, ReCaptcha is helping in digitization of old New York Times issues, which is what, we think, got Google interested.

Actual post from co-founder recaptcha

Quote:

The image is a CAPTCHA — you can read it, but computers have a harder time interpreting the letters. 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.

Since computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain millions of email accounts for spamming. 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.

In this way, reCAPTCHA’s unique technology improves the process that converts scanned images into plain text, known as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). 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.

That's why we're excited to welcome the reCAPTCHA team to Google, and we're committed to delivering the same high level of performance that websites using reCAPTCHA have come to expect. Improving the availability and accessibility of all the information on the Internet is really important to us, so we're looking forward to advancing this technology with the reCAPTCHA team.

Posted by Luis von Ahn, co-founder of reCAPTCHA, and Will Cathcart, Google Product Manager