Google acquires reCAPTCHA

In an entry on the official Google blog, Luis von Ahn, co-founder of reCAPTCHA, and Will Cathcart, Google Product Manager announced that:

The acquisition is not about preventing spam and fraud – it’s about teaching computers to read scanned text. Optical Character Recognition is at the base of Google’s text scanning projects, and a great number of the characters in the CAPTCHAs are derived from old scanned newspapers and books.