Google Acquires reCAPTCHA to Fight Spam and Improve Google Books OCR

Google just announced that it has acquired reCAPTCHA, one of the leading providers of CPATCHAs, the hard-to-read puzzles you often have to solve before you can sign up for a new web service. Google, of course, isn’t so much interested in owning software that can generate CAPTCHAs – that’s an easy problem to solve – but is looking at reCAPTCHA as a way to improve the optical character recognition (OCR) software it uses for large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and the Google News Archive Search…