Registering On Inspirosity Helps To Digitize Books. Really!

reCAPTCHA Logo

It’s a either a sad state of affairs or a testament to technological achievement that sites like Inspirosity must verify humans are really humans before allowing them to register.

You may have noticed that Inspirosity, along with a plethora of other sites, now require you to type in words that appear in a little image box during registration.  This system is referred to as CAPTCHA.  Most of you may already know that this has become a first line of defense against automated programs that search the web, register to websites that they find, and proceed to spam the living hell out of them with ads for male enhancement products and get rich quick schemes.

But as with many things, a creative group of people have gotten together and turned that negative into something very positive.  Enter Carnegie Mellon University.

CMU has developed a system, which Inspirosity uses, called reCAPTCHA.

Around the world there are efforts underway to digitize books and newspapers that were published before the computer age.  Systems are scanning in those pages, and automatically turning them into text.  However, “word recognition” software isn’t perfect, and that’s where you come in!

Instead of simply displaying random words for people to type, reCAPTCHA displays images of words that optical character recognition (OCR) software has been unable to read.  Humans then decipher these words as part of the CAPTCHA process.  The results are then returned to the reCAPTCHA service, which sends the results to the digitization projects.

At the time of this long winded blog post of mine, sites including Facebook, TicketMaster, Twitter, Craigslist, and of course Inspirosity, were all utilizing the reCAPTCHA service and providing about the equivalent of 160 books per day, or 12,000 manhours per day of free labor.

It would appear that ads for Viagra are stimulating things far larger than their small intended targets.