Google Acquires reCAPTCHA

The use of checks on web sites before comments, forum posts, or registrations, are allowed to happen are commonplace with probably the best known being the CAPTCHA test. CAPTCHAs present users with characters that are obscured in some way and presented as an image making it very difficult for anything other than a human to decipher. Those tests are quite effective, but one company called reCAPTCHA had a better idea: use the CAPTCHA tests to serve another purpose by helping to digitise books. When you solve a reCAPTCHA you are actually turning a reference from one of those digital book projects into text. This is necessary because the optical character recognition software used to scan those books can’t always figure out what some of the words are, especially in older books, or when copies exist that have some damage. Now the use of reCAPTCHA is set to expand as Google has announced it has acquired the company