ReCaptcha - digitizing the world's knowledge one word at a time

I’ll say it - ReCaptcha is the most annoying thing on the internet.

But did you know you were helping to digitize all of human knowledge every time you logged into a site?

Here’s what you dint know. 👇

Every time you use ReCaptcha, there are 2 images placed before you wit warped text right?

These are actual images of a book scanned where OCR could not recognize the text.

One of the images is untranslated & while the other is already translated.

You enter the 2 words.

Your answers are compared with 10 other users for the unsolved image.

The common answer goes in to digitize the text.

Ingenious?

Wait till you hear its impact.

Over a billion people have contributed to digitize texts using reCaptcha.

It contributes over 116,000 man-days each day - for free - to the cause.

ReCaptcha, in its hey-day, digitized over 2.5 million books a year.

The next time you solve one, remember, you are just doing your part as a human to make knowledge available to the digital world.

Are there any other such ingenious innovations you have come across?

Would love to learn of them.

Recent Posts