Google has acquired ReCaptcha, one company behind the distorted text boxes found at the bottom of many website sign-in pages.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed but Google plans to use ReCaptcha’s technology both as a security measure within certain Google sites and to make its massive book-scanning project a little smarter, the company said in a blog post. ReCaptcha is an offshoot of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, and puts a twist on the traditional captcha: a string of letters in squiggly text meant to confuse spam bots and other nonhuman web pests.
