2. Book Digitizers

Since we’re on the topic of reCAPTCHA, you probably remember an earlier version of the program. Back in the day, we were asked to rewrite two random words instead of selecting pictures. Why? Because the test held spam which used to be a serious problem at bay.

The change happened because the programs developed to bypass captcha were getting better and better, rendering the squiggly words obsolete. Fun fact, when these automated bots were unable to solve the CAPTCHA they would send them to people, often from countries where wages for such jobs were significantly small.

Their job was to fill in all the blanks that a computer couldn’t guess on its own. Kind of crazy to think that hackers paid these people but Google wasn’t and still isn’t…

But back to the topic at hand! Here’s how it worked. You’d be given two scanned words. One was the actual test that held back robots. Even the scanners couldn’t identify the second word correctly, so that’s where the users came in. Once a few dozen people agreed to what that scanned, squiggly word meant, it was sent back to a database and attached to the previously scanned document.

Though this Google was able to digitize old books and articles, including every New York Times newspaper printed since 1851! Now, where’s my money!?