Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Google Buys reCAPTCHA

Mountain View-based Google announced Wednesday that it has acquired reCAPTCHA, a firm developing software which allows web sites to implement CAPTCHA security features on their websites. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. reCAPTCHA is headed by Luis von Ahn, and started as a project at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Google said that it will be applying reCAPTCHA's technology within Google; the firm also said that the technology will help its book scanning projects like Google Books, as the degraded text in those projects is often used for CAPTCHA challenges.