Google announced today that they acquired reCAPTCHA, the popular anti-bot service. reCAPTCHA offers a first line of defense against internet bots that exploit web forms with malicious intent. They are also widely known for their participation in helping to digitize print media formats. No surprises in why Google would be interested in such a project.

ReCAPTCHA advertises that they are currently helping to digitize old print versions of the New York Times. However, it’s not too far a leap to assume Google will be using reCAPTCHAs to bolster its own text scanning efforts (Google Books). Approximately 200 million captchas are solved by humans each day, and each one moves digitizing projects one step closer to improving the way computers recognize words on paper.

“Improving the availability and accessibility of all the information on the Internet is really important to us, so we're looking forward to advancing this technology with the reCAPTCHA team” said Luis von Ahn (co-founder of reCAPTCHA) and Will Cathcart (Google Product manager) on the official Google blog.