Google Purchases ReCaptcha

Google acquires i.e. purchases Carnegie Mellon’s anti-fraud tool called Recaptcha.

Google has acquired a Carnegie Mellon University spin-off that seeks to cut down on spam and fraud at Web sites while digitizing books.

ReCAPTCHA offers simple word puzzles that users must solve when registering at a Web site or completing an online purchase. Computers can’t decipher the twisted letters and numbers, ensuring that real people and not automated programs are at the keyboard.

Unlike other word puzzles, however, ReCAPTCHA’s text comes from actual books, letting the system create a digitized version in the process.

Terms of the deal, announced Wednesday, were not disclosed. Google said the ReCAPTCHA tool will continue to be available for use on any Web site.

Google Inc. is already behind a major project to digitize books and put them online, mostly by scanning pages and using optical character recognition, or OCR, to make the texts searchable. OCR doesn’t always work on text that is older, faded or distorted. In such cases, often the only way to digitize the works is to manually type them in.

If you are a developer and programmer, don’t waste your time: work hard to create / develop a internet tools that can be beneficial for online community. Who knows, if it’s popular, Google will buy it someday.

Tags: google, google products

This entry was posted on September 17, 2009 at September 17, 2009 and is filed under Blogger Indonesia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.