3 ms·

The first word wasn't the difficult one, it was the last word (it's even tougher to decipher when zoomed in for normal view. Zoomed out, it appears more like 'L

The first word wasn't the difficult one, it was the last word (it's even tougher to decipher when zoomed in for normal view. Zoomed out, it appears more like 'Law'). I agree though, I know the service probably isn't tied to Yelp, I just found it weird that I had to decipher a blob of ink on page 52.

rottencupcakes 15y ago
If one word is completely illegible, it often isn't being used as a captcha. The captcha company may be trying to have you manually recognize text their OCR software could not. You can often make it through after painfully screwing up the hard to read word.
- jrockway 15y ago
  This is how I do reCaptcha. I guess the easy-looking word correctly, and then type garbage for the hard-looking word. This results in approximately 99% correctness and hopefully screws up their "make jrockway do work for us for free" scam.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    What scam? Google offers the reCaptcha service for free in exchange for having words OCRed; seems fair to me. To you as the user, it's not only the same work as any other captcha (which you would have to fill in anyway), but you get free OCRed books and magazines from Google Books. If you don't like the reCaptcha ($deity know why, but it's your right), complain to the website, don't fuck it up for everyone else.
  - michaelcampbell 15y ago
    How proud you must be.
- stan_rogers 15y ago
  That's exactly what's going on with ReCAPTCHA. One of the elements presented is a "known" that you have to get right, and the other is (usually) an unknown or ambiguous OCR result. Google is crowdsourcing their scans. And yes, sometimes it is just a blob of ink -- on other occasions, it's an inline differential equation or something similar that can't be properly entered into the text box (even with the whole of Unicode at your disposal). There's no penalty for getting the graecum est part wrong, but if it's something you can read but can't enter properly, do be a gem and don't pollute the pool of results -- hit the refresh icon.

rottencupcakes 15y ago

If one word is completely illegible, it often isn't being used as a captcha. The captcha company may be trying to have you manually recognize text their OCR software could not. You can often make it through after painfully screwing up the hard to read word.

jrockway 15y ago
This is how I do reCaptcha. I guess the easy-looking word correctly, and then type garbage for the hard-looking word. This results in approximately 99% correctness and hopefully screws up their "make jrockway do work for us for free" scam.
- icebraining 15y ago
  What scam? Google offers the reCaptcha service for free in exchange for having words OCRed; seems fair to me. To you as the user, it's not only the same work as any other captcha (which you would have to fill in anyway), but you get free OCRed books and magazines from Google Books. If you don't like the reCaptcha ($deity know why, but it's your right), complain to the website, don't fuck it up for everyone else.
- michaelcampbell 15y ago
  How proud you must be.
stan_rogers 15y ago
That's exactly what's going on with ReCAPTCHA. One of the elements presented is a "known" that you have to get right, and the other is (usually) an unknown or ambiguous OCR result. Google is crowdsourcing their scans. And yes, sometimes it is just a blob of ink -- on other occasions, it's an inline differential equation or something similar that can't be properly entered into the text box (even with the whole of Unicode at your disposal). There's no penalty for getting the graecum est part wrong, but if it's something you can read but can't enter properly, do be a gem and don't pollute the pool of results -- hit the refresh icon.