Google is using you
Posted on | June 3, 2010 | No Comments
We all Google. You very well know that Google collects search keywords anonymously to give search suggestions to a particular region or worldwide. More than that they use it to help advertisers using adwords to get the list of keywords they can advertise on. Well this is acceptable.
But due you know (via Datamation) that google uses your brain to help develop its own technology.
As you probably know, Google is in the book-scanning business. The company works with libraries and publications (including the New York Times) to scan and digitize book collections. It then posts these texts on the Internet and sells advertising against it. Scanning books is like printing money.
he challenge is that computers aren’t as good as humans at recognizing words. Fortunately, optical character recognition (OCR) systems nowadays are at least smart enough to know what they don’t know — they can identify words that they can’t read, or can’t recognize with certainty.
But what should Google do with those unrecognizable mystery words?
You know those squiggly or otherwise deliberately warped or obscured words you have to type in to “prove you’re human”? They’re called CAPTCHA systems, and they make the world a better place by thwarting software robots that would hack, exploit and abuse various software services if they could.
Less than a year ago, Google bought an interesting variant of CAPTCHA called reCAPTCHA. When you “prove you’re human” at a site using reCAPTCHA, one of the words you identify for access is actually one of those mystery words Google’s OCR computers can’t read. (The other word is known by the system, and used for actually proving you’re human.)
They’re sending the same word to other users, and use the general consensus to identify the word. The results are fed back to the scanning effort, bringing word recognition very close to 100%.
Nice work! Thanks to your brain’s amazing ability to recognize words, Google is making a fortune in the book scanning racket!
Datamation have also written about how Google uses your home.
However, these is acceptable if you look what Facebook does. It uses your private data , what you ‘Like’, etc and shares it with advertisers and third party websites to target you with offers.
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