If you are an avid internet user, you might be familiar with the term ‘captcha’. Yes, you need to fill it up while entering a password on a website or putting details on a form. Google regards it as their way of validating human behaviour.
It is not as simple as you think it is. Apparently, it is not just a piece of evidence that you are a human being. It is how Google is training its artificial intelligence engines.
According to the definition of Google, captcha protects your website.
Here are a few factors about Google captcha.
Google considered captcha as a unique computer program or system that differentiates human from machine input and applied as a measure of hindering spam activities and resulting in electronic data extraction from web platforms.
In simple language, captcha is a costless service designed to protect your website from spam, and abuse and distinguishing humans from bots.
But it should be mentioned that the search engine giant has not laid the seeds for captcha. One of the most important Captcha systems is reCAPTCHA that was kickstarted by a group of scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, US in the year 2007. Google acquired the project after two years of its foundation in 2009.
How Google Captcha Works?
Captcha was put into effect with the objective of making users prove they are human through the means of interpretation and deciphering and this enables Google to identify crafted characters in pictures.
At the time of filling captcha, we do the odd job of digitising letters on behalf of Google. It has designed a platform where millions of users detect variable characters from the pictures and fill them without their knowledge instead of recruiting an in-house team for the same.
When you are trying to access a website, you might encounter several mixed-up words placed in a haphazard manner. You need to identify those words and fill the blanks. In this way, you are working on behalf of Google in transcribing the words. Just think, how many words you have decoded throughout your lifetime. If you would have been a Googler, you could have earned millions from it.
Another feature of this tool is that you cannot mislead the tool. It has the ability to check its work. It displays the same set of words to multiple users and can electronically verify them if they are decoded correctly through the comparison of attempts of a large number of users across the globe.
A staggering record suggests that by 2011, reCAPTCHA had initiated digitisation of the entire archive of Google books and more than 10 million articles from the New York Times catalogue since 1851.
Post the completion of digitisation of books; Google helped the users in transcribing signs and symbols.
Soon, Google was left with no books to digitise. Hence, it began implementing snippets of photos from Google Street View. Back in 2012, it enabled the users in transcribing door numbers and auxiliary signs and symbols. Since April 2014, the system started.
After Google had no books left to digitise, it started using snippets of photos from Google Street View in 2012. It made users transcribe door numbers and other signs and symbols. From April 2014, the system started providing training to its Artificial Intelligence (AI) engines.
How does Google train the Artificial Intelligence engines?
In order to train the engine, you need to feed the machine a stream of assorted data. For instance, you might have identified a picture of a shopping mall and then the AI engine uses that information for building a neural network that helps it to identify shopping malls out of other images. The more pictures of shopping malls you are going to transfer to the machine, the more authentic it becomes in detecting it.
Applications
Captcha is one way how Google is recognising images and generating optimised results for the users that include an accurate search for a specific keyword alongside providing better results on Google Maps.
This is how Google helps you in locating pictures from the library of Google photos for all the specific pictures you have taken for a particular object or place.