Spam is an issue for most interactive websites, people looking to promote their site, or products they are selling are constantly trying to use well-known sites to advertise on. That’s why webmasters are in a constant battle to remove, or better yet prevent, those adverts.
One tool to combat this problem is the ‘Captcha’. A Captcha is basically a small web-based Turing test, its job is to be a filter for the interactive sections of the website, stopping automated spamming while letting genuine human users through.
reCaptcha is a Google owned tool that combines the usefulness of a captcha with the interesting idea of getting users to help digitise books. reCaptcha displays a couple of warped partially visible words (normally fairly easy to read by humans) – these words are actually from scanned sections of books that a normal OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has had difficulty reading. In effect reCaptcha users are helping digitise books!
..More information can be found on reCaptcha’s site – including plug-ins for popular applications.
You may also be interested in:
- Are The Best Parts Of Your Site ‘Below The Fold’? Have you ever worried about what portions of your site are not immediately visible to the average user? If not,...
- Ramsay’s Web Wire – Issue #22: China, Google and Pachyderms? This week we talk Google in China, Eric Schmidt's big ideas as well as online map reviews and about the...
- MOU Week-End Blog (29-01-10) Friday's week-end blog is a major part of our diet here on the Moovin On Up blog. This week we...
- Google Adwords Wants To Make It Big On Youtube The hungry gaze of Google AdWords rests on the hugely popular YouTube....
- Google Plays with Reader Google branches out again with some improvements for their popular Reader application. Now you can use it as the perfect...
Evolution is an