What’s In A Captcha? Lots, Actually

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We’ve all seen them: those anti-spam measures displaying garbled words we’re to type to verify we’re human. Known as Captchas (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), they’re used around 100 million times per day across the internet.

Bloggers using Captchas swear by them as a means of thwarting spam comments, but readers often feel they’re more of a hassle than they’re worth.

Now, all that time and typing is being put to good use thanks to the Recaptcha project. Instead of random words, sites participating in the project are using Captchas featuring words from old manuscripts and scanned archives that were marked as unreadable by scanners. When those words are displayed to a human user, who then types them in, the responses are added to a database, much of which is reviewed by humans to ensure accuracy prior to modifying the scanned archive.

Currently around 40,000 sites have signed up to be Recaptcha partners with over 4 million word responses being logged every day. In the last year alone the project has helped decipher over 400 million words, including digitization of the NY Times archive from 1908.

Suddenly, those little screens don’t seem nearly as annoying, do they?

(Source)

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