I think this is great news. Google can truly take this service to the next level, and even improve upon it to not only provide a better, more available and robust service but also to improve other technologies along the way.

You know those boxes with funky looking letters that are becoming increasingly common on website registration forms, or on Facebook Pages when you want to post an update? They’re called captchas and they’re used primarily to deter spammers and bots.

One of the biggest providers of the technology is a company called reCAPTCHA, and now, Google owns them. The search giant just announced on their blog that they’re buying reCAPTCHA, which is used on more than 100,000 websites worldwide.

Why exactly does Google want to own this technology? For starters, reCAPTCHA has a unique solution. As Google describes:

“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.”

And where does that fit within the Google portfolio of products? Google Books. The company continues:

“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.”

In other words, those 100,000+ captcha forms are now Google-powered, with the data being used to improve Google’s ability to digitize old books and newspapers to make them Web searchable. It makes a lot of sense, and gives Google yet another strategic advantage over would-be competitors.

via Google Acquires reCAPTCHA.

Original post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-computers-to-read-google.html