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Good move. Google wants to digitize all the books in the world, and reCaptcha does just that. Google could have tried just becoming a client of reCaptcha, but t
by seldo 17y ago
Good move. Google wants to digitize all the books in the world, and reCaptcha does just that. Google could have tried just becoming a client of reCaptcha, but their scale would have crushed reCaptcha, to say nothing of the business risk of outsourcing a key stage of your signup process to a third party.
The logical solution was to buy them and Google-size their infrastructure.
From a personal perspective, I don't think this really changes how I feel about reCaptcha either. They'll still have the same mission -- unless Google stops them reading out of copyright classics and puts them onto scanning in Dan Brown novels, which I think is unlikely.
- amanfredi 17y agoGoogle already has a great captcha for their signup process. The primary motivation must have been the OCR benefits.
- shimon 17y agoOr the team.
- breck 17y agoOr the analytics. It's on 100,000 sites.
- seldo 17y agoIsn't that what I said?
- amanfredi 17y ago"to say nothing of the business risk of outsourcing a key stage of your signup process to a third party." I thought you meant that Google would have actually considered ditching their own captcha in favor of recaptcha for google sign-up.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- fuzzmeister 17y agoSince most modern books either have high-quality print copies or digital copies available, I doubt that this technology will be used for much else than scanning old books for the foreseeable future.