One was used for control, the second deciphered an uncertain word using the power of crowdsourcing.Īfter reCAPTCHA was bought by Google in 2009, it was used to help digitize Google Books and displayed over 100 million captchas per day at its peak. Originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University by Luis von Ahn, reCAPTCHA was based on mass collaboration to digitize books, with a pair of words presented to the user. History of CAPTCHAĬaptchas have been in use since the early 2000s, when they mostly looked like this: Over time, as computers have become more powerful and algorithms more complex, captchas have evolved to use image recognition and other alternative approaches. The earliest text-based captchas made use of the human ability to recognize letters that are malformed and distorted. The CAPTCHA, or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, was introduced to prevent bots and spammers from interacting with websites.Ĭaptchas take advantage of the fact that humans are exceptionally good at doing some things that computers find very difficult. We're going to look at why they're bad UX, how they can easily get bypassed, and what alternatives exist.ĬAPTCHAs (or captchas, for when we feel less like screaming in all caps in this post) are one sure-fire way to ruin your enjoyment of any website, as you struggle and squint to decipher those blurry, weirdly-angled images.Īpify is a web scraping and automation platform, and anyone who is involved in web scraping at even the most superficial level will know that captchas are often one of the first puzzles a budding web scraper will need to deal with (although usually, they aren’t much of an obstacle, as you’ll find out below).īut how much do you really know about captchas? Why do we need them, are there alternatives, and do they even still work on the modern web? Read on for a quick exploration of the CAPTCHA and how it fails on multiple fronts, and might even be the cause for some exploitative practices across the world. Is it a bird, is it a plane, is it a bike, or is it a bus, or is it just a badly pixelated image of a CAPTCHA? This common feature, designed to verify human visitors, can be a huge obstacle in the user experience.

Bot solves captcha