Google is buying reCaptcha, to help with their book scanning initiative. reCaptcha specializes in those captcha’s you see on forms, that prevent spam bots from inundating a site with information requests. The company uses robust scanning technology to get the images from old books. Google is also in the business of scanning old books, so the two made (or are making) a deal.
Will Cathcart, a Google product manager, in a blog post, explains.
“…reCaptcha’s unique technology improves the process that converts scanned images into plain text, known as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This technology also powers large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search. We’ll 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.”
Google’s noble quest to get all information in the world indexed and easily searchable (and make billions in advertising next to it) continues…