logoThis isn’t new stuff by any means, but I thought I would write about it because of its total awesomeness. What reCAPTCHA does is it displays 2 words that are randomly taken from the scanned books of the Internet Archive and asks you to type in what the words are. This does a couple things: A) It displays essentially impossible-to-read words to you as a deterrent to bots, and B) one of the two words are already known, and by answering the known word correctly, it then confirms both words are right. 150,000 hours a day are spent by humans reading CAPTCHA’s, so why not put that time to good use by digitizing books? You can see by the image below how a typical computer scan reads a book:

So if you are a web developer, go and signup for reCAPTCHA and start using it on your site and help digitize the world’s books one word at a time.

Related posts