Google Buys reCAPTCHA To Aid Book Digitization
gigaom.com/2009/09/16/419-google-buys-recaptcha
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Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has purchased reCAPTCHA, a company that creates automated messagesor captchasthat users type to prove that they are not bots. Financial terms were not released. The words in reCaptchas captchas come from scanned copies of the NYT, so reCaptcha is using human inputs to improve optical character recognitiona technology that takes scanned images and transforms them into text. Its accuracy is 99.1 percent, compared to 83.5 percent for optical character recognition on its own. Google says it will use reCaptcha to improve its own scanning projectsin both books and newspapersand also to improve fraud and spam protection across Google products. In a blog post announcing the news, Google also said that it would continue to support third-party websites that are using reCaptchas technology, including Facebook, Ticketmaster, and Craigslist. reCaptchas executive producer, Luis Von Ahn, is a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, and a winner of a MacArthur genius grant. The startup has six people on staff, several of whom also work at Carnegie Mellon.