I came across a very interesting new concept at Ben Maurer’s blog today: reCaptcha. We’re all familiar with the standard Captcha - a word that is slightly disfigured and used to prevent bots from submitting a form.

reCaptcha expands on this issue by presenting two Captcha words. The first is a word the system knows and understands - to ensure you are not a bot. The second, is a word the system doesn’t know. By entering your solution to the second word, you are assisting the Internet Archive in solving words their OCR software doesn’t understand.

Around 60 million Captchas are solved each day, which amounts to about 150,000 hours of work. By leveraging this work, reCaptcha is providing an excellent service to the Internet Archive. Various plugins are available for the major software applications out there, including Wordpress, Mediawiki, and phpBB. To learn how you can use reCaptcha on your site - visit the reCaptcha website.