Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Fucking With Google

Someone told me that the captchas that Google use are not only to see if you are a real person, but to help Google improve its character recognition algorithms. Two words or numbers are presented-- one that Google knows what it is (the "are you real" test) and what that they aren't sure of (the "you'll help us refine our algorithms and like it" one).

I've tested this by deliberately entering the wrong answer for one of the two tests, not an answer that is completely wrong, but one that is just off a little. So far, the erroneous answers seem to be, more often than not, accepted as valid.

7 comments:

  1. Interesting. This very morning I had to decipher something so scrunched together that one of the letters was either 'a' or 'e' (I think I went with 'e').

    The numbers, I have no trouble with.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The photographed numbers are ones that I'll mess up and they get accepted.

      Delete
  2. I always screw up the captchas, but it seems as if it's okay if you screw up the second "word" - those are usually the weird nonhuman words anyway.

    ReplyDelete
  3. There is a certain unnamed "community" on the web whose members always type revolting obscenities for the second word. I wonder if Google has trained one of its robots to track the IP addresses of people who do that....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think that it is a bit more subversive to just be *slightly* off.

      Delete
  4. Joe...... I may have been known to be one of those people. MAY have been, not saying I was, and if I was, it was because Obama was doing it too. But my advisors have made it clear that I have NEVER EVER done such a thing, and so I think maybe I haven't. And if I did, it was by accident, and not by policy.

    What do you think, guys? Am I ready to run for fucking President yet?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Just did this on a comment over at WWVB's blog. Fun.

    Disclaimer: I don't mean to impugn WWVB by having done it there.

    LRod
    ZJX, ORD, ZAU retired

    ReplyDelete

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