Will Google Make reCAPTCHA Even Better?

Google have acquired reCAPTCHA, the CAPTCHA spam stopping service that gives you a visual presentation of words scanned out of public domained books. You know the kind, that nasty image where you have to struggle to read the letters you have to input in a field to validate that you aren’t a spam bot. I like reCAPTCHA and use them when CAPTCHA functionality is needed, a necessary evil sometimes, but no universal solution nonetheless.

Maybe Google can make it work even better? After all, they have a huge amount of content to pull from thanks to Google Books, maybe that can help? Personally I doubt it, Google hints to why they are in fact buying reCAPTCHA in the announcement post (bold added by yours truly):

So we’ll 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.

That being said, I remain slightly optimistic that Google can make reCAPTCHA a better solution when a CAPTCHA is needed.

Author: Thord Daniel Hedengren

Thord Daniel Hedengren is a designer, writer, and blogger, and also the former editor of The Blog Herald. He used to be a hotshot in the gaming industry in Sweden, but sold everything and went International. Most recently he wrote a book called Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog, and does loads of kickass design.