By Bernard Maldonado
Google announced the acquisition of ReCaptcha today. A blog post offers general details about the transaction.
As of noon today, there is not much detail from the ReCaptcha Official Website. A quick scan of the Google Press Releases also does not yield details into the transaction.
After reading the article, it’s clear that Google wants to leverage the power of the ReCaptcha tool with the Google Books Project. Furthermore, Google aims to tighten security to prevent rogue accounts being created.
ReCaptcha, a non-profit project managed by Carnegie Mellon University, uses a control word, plus another word that comes from text that could not be correctly OCR’d. The person solving the Captcha contributes to digitizing books by doing what the OCR engine could not: convert the graphic into text.
Google books is a grand project. It makes sense that Google took notice and sought to incorporate the ReCaptcha Project into the Google Books Project. The Google book conversions can benefit from Captchas that are correctly solved.
This acquisition opens the door to a few questions that I would like to point out and discuss:
1. In previous months, Google published a white paper on a new Captcha based on rotating an image. Here is the link to that project. What will happen with that tool? Since it does not contribute to any book project, will it be scrapped?
2. What kind of Captcha will Google now present on registration pages? Google’s current Captcha has a 20% failure rate expectation by design. The two Captchas are fundamentally so different – Google and ReCaptcha. It’s hard for me to imagine half of each to combine a new tool.
3. What innovation will take place regarding accessibility? This is such an important topic since Captchas are literal Fire Walls for visually impaired Internet users. Will Google reach out to accessibility advocates in order to provide information and cooperation?
4. Since Google is a for-profit company, and offers extensive services related to demographic targeting, will Google attempt to use Captchas in a way similar to it’s popular Ad-sense or Ad-words products, or the way GMail is targeted based on key words?
There is a lot of room here for Google to innovate. It is important that we understand their objective.
Just as I pointed out in the Microsoft Patent Application article, I see an opportunity for Google to enhance the level of accessibility incorporated to the Captch Tool.
It is widely known the the audio alternative for Google, as well as ReCaptcha, are near impossible to solve. That is why services like Solona and Web Visum exist – to empower people to solve Captchas as independently as possible.
I look forward to more information regarding this acquisition as well as any future tools that are released and implemented. As I learn more, I will post to the blog.
Here are some additional links that talk about the Google & ReCaptcha Transaction.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2352941,00.asp
http://www.willhambly.com/2009/07/recaptchas-business-model.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-computers-to-read-google.html
http://www.centernetworks.com/google-acquires-recaptcha
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