Google is in the process of purchasing reCAPTCHA, a spam/fraud prevention company.
Many of reCAPTCHA's words, which must be typed by human hands to ensure against bots that may attempt to spam sites, come from scanned newspapers and books — an idea developed to improve the process of converting scanned images into text.
The technology powering reCAPTCHA is called Optical Character Recognition — which "also powers large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search," according to a Google blog post written by co-founder Luis von Ahn of reCAPTCHA and product manager Will Cathcart of Google.
"Having the text version of documents is important because plain text can be searched, easily rendered on mobile devices and displayed to visually impaired users. 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."
This week Adobe purchased Omniture and the Rubicon Project purchased Others Online. The growing number of M&As in the space is at least one indication that the sun has begun to rise on the economy.
