ReCaptcha- Most Annoying Thing You Will Happily Tolerate.

Annoying things exist.  You can’t escape errands, laundry, traffic, pesky bills, airline security, doing your taxes, remembering different passwords to different websites, long lines and surly government employees.  Annoying and, very often, necessary.

Then came the Captcha.

“What?”

You heard me.

Captcha. Otherwise known as the annoyingly weird exercise of retyping hard to read words when you try to “friend” someone on Facebook. Gmail and Yahoo use captcha to stop spammers from obtaining millions of accounts that they’d use to send spam email. It’s put there to make sure automated programs, or “Bots,” don’t gain access to websites. They, like you, can’t read the wavy, out of focus random words. A computer program, they get over it. You just seethe.

Modern Captcha Image from Wikipedia

With 200 million captchas “solved” everyday by suckers like you and me, at 10 seconds every time, that roughly adds up to around 150,000 hours each day. EACH DAY.  

I bet that got your attention. It should, because it’s an impressive statistic.

Enter reCaptcha. This little company might just get you to actually tolerate this annoying exercise.  Seriously. And more companies should adopt this version of the captcha.

Besides being FREE, ReCaptcha, is helping digitize newspapers, books and old-time radio shows, by putting this wasted time to actual good use. Every reCaptcha solved adds to the world’s library of digital books.

Humans assist in the digitizing of books, by "reading" what optical scanners can't. (reCaptcha website)

Books written prior to computer are currently being “read” by optical computers that scan pages. Except with real type-setting, which is often imperfect, they can’t read the text. Like 20% of the time. So reCaptcha takes the text the computers can’t read and uses it as the security image that you and I have to retype to “friend” Bob Smith on Facebook (except Facebook doesn’t use reCaptcha and yes, that sucks.) You can read more about reCaptcha in their paper cited in Sept. 2008 Science Magazine. 

This appeals to me on a lot of fronts. Captchas by themselves are a necessary evil. I get it. ReCaptcha just makes it an efficient use of my time, and one that benefits the world in a real meaningful, tangible way.

What would happen if more companies used ReCaptcha? The world’s digital knowledge base deepens, and I’d be more than happy to help.

3 Responses to “ReCaptcha- Most Annoying Thing You Will Happily Tolerate.”

1. Donna Calhoun says:

   March 27, 2009 at 1:11 AM

   Hi Betsy,

   This is the coolest thing I’ve heard in a while! But this might explain why sometimes, I really can’t read the captcha. Do humans than verify that the word makes sense later? If I just typed something random into a reCapture, would it catch me?

   Take care,

   Donna
2. Inquisix - Selling by Referrals » Blog Archive » Inquisix out of Private Beta says:

   April 8, 2009 at 9:57 PM

   [...] what the reCaptcha system is doing while you decipher those images into text. As quoted from our Marketing VP’s other blog, “ReCaptcha is helping digitize newspapers, books and old-time radio shows, by putting this [...]
3. David says:

   May 11, 2009 at 6:21 PM

   I think this thing must be bugging, cause after a while in couchsurfing i just keep typing words that i know are right and i keep getting more. . . . i’d hate to quit couchsurfing because this app is making my searches impossible, i agree with the idea, something good should come from our idleness in the internet but this is abuse as it is, hopefully it will be better later on . . . . for the moment it mainly makes me want to slap the person who did it so he turns it off or at least down