World’s most dominant search engine website Google Inc. announced on Wednesday that it has acquired a anti-fraud and spam program developed by Carnegie Mellon University called ReCAPTCHA, which would allow them to cut down unwanted spam while it digitize copies of books.
The ReCAPTCHA program works by asking users to solve and type simple “twisted” word and number puzzles when they register at the Google e-book website or if they are going to purchase a book online.
According to Google, the program blocks computer image-readers from deciphering twisted letters and numbers written in a designated box, ensuring the company that a real person was making a book purchase and not automated computer programs designed to send spam messages.
Another cool feature of the ReCAPTCHA is that the text and numbers in the puzzles came from the actual books that the users want to buy. This would also allow Google’s system to create the instant digitize version of the book as the customer type the answer.
However, Google and Carnegie Mellon refused to discuss the terms of the deal, which was closed on Wednesday.
Based on study by some IT experts, Google is already lagging behind their projected targets on digital books, saying that the company still uses an optical character recognition (OCR) to scan the entire pages of the books, including the images and texts.
However, this method has a back-draft since it can’t read faded or distorted copies of some titles. The only solution that the company provided was to type the books manually.
Snippets that computer scanners can not recognize were merged into a single word and use as a puzzle or test that would allow the Internet giant to see if it is a real person that logged-in at the sites in the Web.
The program will then reassemble the entire books based on the correct input of the users.
For their part, ReCAPTCHA Inc. developer and Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Luis Von Ahn said that it is about time that the company to find a home, saying that Google is the best option for them.
Related posts: