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Google didn't invent this: Luis von Ahn, a CMU grad student did in 2000. Google acquired it in 2009. https://www.cylab.cmu.edu/partners/success-stories/recaptc

• jpatokal 10y ago
  The original pre-Google reCAPTCHA was used for digitizing books. Using it to read house numbers for Street View was a Google addition.
  • bbarn 10y ago
    The original inventor also went on to found Duolingo, which uses teaching someone a language as a way to translate web pages as a service. I like that model a lot more, as at least you get something in exchange (the language learning)
    • joshuamorton 10y ago
      (am google) To be fair, if you use google maps, and don't have any ethical issues with helping googler, you do get a return on investment, in that you get improved ML capabilities and improved address recognition in google maps.
• dsp1234 10y ago
  The above poster doesn't say that Google invented recaptcha, only that their use of it to have humans clean street view data is very Googly. The original recaptcha was only text from book digitization projects.