The Story
Google has decided that they want a piece of captcha pie, captchas being those distorted images users type into online forms to check that they are human. Google bought up reCAPTCHA, which is probably the best captcha maker out there. The captcha technology uses distorted images of letters and numbers to make it hard for software to know what’s on screen, which in turn prevents a lot of automated spam.
Google Sees Gold
Google is obviously buying reCAPTCHA because they see value in the market and in owning a company that already has captchas working well. The overall purpose of captchas is to block programs from filling out forms, which is easy if you’re willing to show something completely illegible, but that makes form completion extremely hard on real live humans. If Google can develop captchas that work better than the current technology, then they stand to make some money charing websites to use their product.
Keep in mind that Google being Google, they’re probably going to be looking to do a general overhaul of captchas. They actually tried that earlier this summer by using inverted images instead of text, with the hope being that computer programs would not be able to make heads or tails of what was on screen, despite the images being very clear to human users. The conclusion we can draw from this is that there is some talent at reCAPTCHA that Google thinks will help to develop whatever the next generation of spam prevention.
