Luis von Ahn, cofounder of reCAPTCHA, and Will Cathcart, Google Product Manager explainSince computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain m

But theres a twist the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text.In this way, reCAPTCHAs unique technology improves the process that converts scanned images into plain text, known as Optical Character Recognition OCR. This technology also powers large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search. Having the text version of documents is important because plain text can be searched, easily rendered on mobile devices and displayed to visually impaired users. So well be applying the technology within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process. Well, they didnt exactly rule the ad thing out, but it does appear that the acquisition is more in line with Googles conquest to organize the worlds information. Google did not reveal financial terms of the acquisition.