Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, an open source technology that provides CAPTCHAs to prevent spam and fraud. Captchas are those security questions you find on Web sites that require you to decipher and type words or numbers and detects whether the user is a human.

Here's what Google wrote in a blog post about the announcement:

Google says that reCAPTCHA's technology improves the process that converts scanned images into plain text, known as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). It sounds like Google will be using the technology to power massive scanning projects for Google Books and Google News Archive Search as well as for fraud and spam prevention.

In May, the New York Times reported that Google was developing their own type of captcha and also took notice of the potential of reCAPTCHA's technology. Sounds like Google found it more effective to acquire reCAPTCHA's technology instead of reinventing the wheel.

To read the complete article, see:Google Acquires reCaptcha To Power Scanning For Google Books And Google News(www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/16/google-acquires-recaptcha-to-power-scanning-for-google-books-and-google-news/)