Answering captcha tests are one of those activities that we are most likely not to mind. After all, it only takes around 5 seconds of our time everytime we do it.
The real value of time spent on answering captcha tests is revealed when the time spent is accumulated. So if you take 5 seconds to do it, and you answer around 5 such tests everyday, that's already 25 seconds of your time spent on captcha tests every single day. Now repeat that for one million people and you get 25 million human-seconds spent on captcha tests. That around 290 days if only one person answered it.
That's a lot of time wasted, isn't it? Won't it be better if it was spend on more important things? But, obviously, answering captchas is only one of those remaining tests that somehow protect the integrity and privacy of information over the Web. Is there any way to make this more useful?
Of course, there is. A company called reCaptcha is providing captcha services not only to protect consumers, but also to help digitize a large amount of the world's books. You see, a lot of books remain undigitized, due to the most computers' inability to read them. With reCaptcha, millions of people everyday help computers do their job and digitize some of the world's most precious treasures.
What's better is that we Google recently announced its acquisition of the company. This is especially helpful for the company in powering its large-scale scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search. As we all know, converting scanned books to their text versions is especially important in searching, rendering to mobile devices, and to relaying information to the visually impaired. This is an exciting new partnership that is worth monitoring.
For more details, please refer to this blog post from The Google Blog.
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