Google Buys CAPTCHA Technology

by Chloe Albanesius

Google announced Wednesday that it has acquired reCaptcha for an undisclosed sum – an endeavor, it said, that will help it improve the quality of its book-scanning project.

CAPTCHA tests are the squiggly letters that are displayed when Internet users are signing up for a service or buying items online. Computers cannot easily recognize these letters, so if the user gets it right, it's a fair bet that a human is behind the computer screen and not a machine trying to scalp concert tickets or hack into e-mails.

As a result, Google will use the reCaptcha technology to improve fraud and spam protection. But it will also assist with Google's complex and controversial book- and newspaper-scanning efforts.

Many of the words included in Captcha challenges come from scanned archival newspaper 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," Luis von Ahn, co-founder of reCaptcha and Will Cathcart, Google product manager, wrote in a blog post.

Technology from reCaptcha "improves the process that converts scanned images into plain text [and] powers large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search," they wrote.

Converting these scanned documents to text is important, Google said, so that it can be searched, displayed on mobile devices, and accessed by the visually impaired.

"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," they wrote.

Google's book-scanning program is currently drawing criticism from copyright holders, libraries, and scrutiny from regulators. Critics like Microsoft and Yahoo argue that a 2008 class-action settlement essential allows Google to scan now and answer copyright questions later. Google argues that its program actually provides a financial incentive for authors to come forward, claim their works, and allow them on Google Books.