Mountain View, California — Google Inc., owner of the most popular search engine, announced on its blog Wednesday that it plans to intensify its gigantic efforts to scan tens of millions of books and periodicals with the acquisition of “ReCAPTCHA,” a company that provides those familiar crooked text boxes at the bottom of many Web site sign-in pages — that helps Web operators prevent spam and fraud.
Humans can read and exactly rewrite the words displayed to avail various services online, but the slanting, jumbled or distorted letters often trip up malicious programs. With the acquisition of ReCaptcha, Google hopes to improve security on its sites and make its book-scanning project smarter.
ReCAPTCHA, is a famous provider of CAPTCHA technology, which is used to prevent spammers from using computers to automatically register for online services, such as webmail accounts and Web site registrations.
CAPTCHA, which symbolizes “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” requires users to type randomly chosen words that appear as images, a process that is easy for humans but hard for computers to do correctly.
“So we will be using the application within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process,” reads a blog post in Google’s official blog authored by Luis von Ahn, co-founder of reCAPTCHA, and Will Cathcart, a Google product manager.
Google, which commands the search market, is bolstering up other businesses, including offering books and news online. Earlier this week, the company unveiled a news reader called “Fast Flip” that can quickly flip through stories from three dozen publications.
Google explains:
“Improving the availability and accessibility of all the information on the Internet is really important to us, so wer are looking forward to advancing this technology with the ReCAPTCHA team,” Google said.
“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 will 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.”
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Google intends to apply ReCAPTCHA’s technology both as a security measure within certain Google sites and to make its massive book-scanning project a little smarter. ReCaptcha is an offshoot of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, and delivers a twist on the traditional captcha: a string of letters in crooked text meant to confuse spam bots and other nonhuman Web pests.
The ReCAPTCHA technology is used by more that 100,000 Web sites, and it is helping to digitize old editions of The New York Times.
Lastly, however, one wonders if such improvements would not undermine the raison d’etre of ReCaptcha, by teaching computers to read the very text now used to foil automated programs.
Google, based in Mountain View, California, rose $10.75, or 2.3 percent, to $488.29 at 4 p.m. New York time on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares have climbed 59 percent this year.