Recaptcha.net - Digitizing Books With Turing Tests

CAPTCHA"s are programs designed to discern whether a user is a human or a computer, sort of like a simplified Voight-Kampff or Turing test. You"ll often find CAPTCHA"s which are colored boxes with distorted text on web registration forms. Recaptcha has determined that about 60 million of these CAPTCHA"s are solved by humans each day, with each taking around 10 seconds to complete or 150,000 hours of work per day. It aims to use these tests to assist in the effort to digitize books. Books are scanned and the pages are then transformed into text via OCR"s or Optical Character Recognition. However some OCR converted texts cannot be read by computers which is why Recaptcha turns OCR text into CAPTCHA"s for humans to solve. Recaptcha is completely free to use on your own site and it contributes to a great cause. Recaptcha was created by the original CAPTCHA creators and has the highest security standards; download it for your site today and help digitize books.

reCAPTCHA helps prevent automated abuse of your site (such as comment spam or bogus registrations) by using a CAPTCHA to ensure that only humans perform certain actions.

Recaptcha is quite an ingenious solution to digitizing books. Not only do websites benefit from the prevention of spambots etc, everyone benefits by helping to digitize books. CAPTCHA"s are used on many sites, so users will have to decipher the words anyways-- it"s no extra work for them.

Will website operators adopt Recaptcha, or will the perhaps added effort needed for users to decipher OCR"s keep Recaptcha from being used? Will the CAPTCHA"s take longer to decipher? Is it really profitable for a site to keep users occupied with CAPTCHA"s?