Google acquires Carnegie Mellon's anti-fraud tool (Associated Press)
The next time you key in one of those skewed words to enter a website or complete an online transaction, you may be helping Google digitize a word in an eBook.
Quote:
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.
|
Quote:
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.
ReCAPTCHA provides an alternative. Snippets that the computer doesn't recognize are split up into single words that can be used as human tests at sites all over the Internet. The ReCAPTCHA system reassembles the text of the book from those responses.
|