Innovation 101: reCaptcha
- Posted by glen on November 5th, 2007
Sometimes a creative solution to a problem just inspires like no other. I recently stumbled upon reCaptcha, a captcha solution for websites. Captcha is that kind of annoying thing that makes you enter random words by squinting at a funky, distorted image. It’s an almost necessary evil these days to ward off spammers.
But reCaptcha has found a way to make the whole process 1) less-annoying and 2) actually beneficial to society as a whole. They’re essentially making lemonade from lemons.
You can see a live example on their homepage. reCaptcha takes a pair of words scanned from a real book, as part of the Internet Archive. While these endless pages are being scanned, the computer occasionally comes up with words it’s not quite sure how to interpret . (See image below.)
This is where reCaptcha is genius. It takes a combination of two words that can’t be read by computers, and ensures they’re read by humans. Every every time you enter the two word combo into the reCaptcha box, two more words are correctly identified, and that book is closer to being digitally archived. Beautiful.
This is a perfect example of what I call the “Two Birds, One Stone” method for developing a solution. Any time that you can take something cumbersome and make easier to use and more useful, you’ve got solid gold on your hands.
November 5th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Actually, if it used two unknown words, it would be completely useless since it would have no idea wether or not the user wrote the correct words and any spambot would pass through. :)
What it does is take one KNOWN word and one unknown word. If the known word matches, the unknown word is assumes to be a match as well.
November 5th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
Isn’t the whole idea behind captcha to match the user input with the text in the distorted image?
If there is nothing to match up to - what would stop a spambot from entering random text?
November 5th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
oh, just saw your comment Havard - inventive solution!
November 5th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
Actually, this was reported in a recent Wired article as well:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/15-07/ff_humancomp
David Douthitt
http://administratosphere.wordpress.com
November 6th, 2007 at 5:45 am
Hi Glen,
This is kind of cool. How come you didn’t implement it yet for comments? Do you know if this has a consensus system to validate what users are inputting or does it only need one person to assume that it’s correct?
November 6th, 2007 at 11:21 am
@Dark Sociologist: Good question ;) I’ve implemented it already on the comments for the LifeRemix network blog (http://blog.liferemix.net), I just haven’t gotten around to it on Wordpress yet. I will soon ;)
November 6th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
There is a WordPress plugin for recaptcha. I’ve installed it on a club website (listed above) that I run. Although, nobody except spammers leaves comments there, so it’s not getting much use (but now it’s keeping out some spammers). But it was a cinch to install.
November 26th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
We actually did an interview/article on the guy behind reCaptcha over at Behance…it is a fascinating story and such a great concept! Link enclosed below, fyi…
http://www.behance.com/Featured/Articles/Luis-von-Ahn-Capturing-Ideas-for-the-Masses/5581