Innovation 101: reCaptcha

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.

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