Google Technology & Captcha

Different CAPTCHA services will differentiate humans and bots in different ways. For example, distorting and skewing a series of letters making them too difficult for automated programmes to decipher, but not so difficult for humans to figure them out. Researchers have found that Google’s Street View technology can decipher them with 99 percent accuracy. A company that Google bought in 2009, reCAPTCHA, takes a different approach that not only provides the security of a CAPTCHA form, but actually serves another purpose. reCAPTCHA is used to digitize old printed materials such as books. It presents the user with two words that could not initially be read by computers – one that has previously been verified by a number of users and one that has not. It can simultaneously determine if a user is human and partially verify a new word.
With CAPTCHAs, it’s understandable that individuals with malicious intent may want to crack them. Google does its own research into this so that it can improve the security of the reCAPTCHA service. As part of its research, it has applied the technology it uses for identifying house numbers in Street View to identifying CAPTCHA words.
The research found that the technology could “decipher the hardest distorted text puzzles from reCAPTCHA with over 99 percent accuracy.”As a result, Google suggests that answering a distorted image puzzle should not be the only factor used to distinguish a human from a machine.