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September 16, 2009, 02:00 PM ET
Google Says Gotcha to ReCaptcha, the Word-Puzzle Company
Search giant Google Inc. announced today that it has purchased reCaptcha, a company that began as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University. ReCaptcha develops online word puzzles to serve both as Web-site security and to help digitize printed text, and Google says it will use it in projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search.
The Carnegie Mellon researchers began their reCaptcha project in 2007 in the hope of killing two birds with one stone. The method takes the distorted word puzzles aimed at keeping hackers and spambots from logging into Web pages, and turns them into micro-archiving machines.
The project works with the understanding that one thing humans can still do better than computers is recognize text. Luis von Ahn, the computer scientist who created the technique along with his colleagues, realized this when he first invented the original Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) protection puzzles.
ReCaptcha puts the Captcha technique to use to actually label content in archives, by taking words that automatic book scanners can't decipher and presenting them to computer users to have them identify the words as they log in to Web sites.
Mr. von Ahn says that Google is a perfect fit because, among other reasons, "people often assumed the project was connected to Google" anyway.
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