Wednesday, 14 March 2012

Please prove you're not a robot!

I try to be a good blogger and reply to the blogs I read as much as possible. I mainly reply when I feel I can relate, maybe help in some way, sympathise or just find it interesting, funny or amusing. I know what it feels like to write something and not get as many comments as you would like. I think it's nice to know who's reading your posts and what they think. Thank you to all of you who do leave comments.
But in order to leave a comment, often you have to decipher an almost impossible word and type it yourself. I was going to complain about how difficult these words are and how they don't even mean anything, but then I clicked on the question mark next to the box and read this:

Helping the World One Word at a Time

By entering the words in the box, you are also helping to digitize texts that were written before the computer age. The words that you see were taken directly from old texts that are being scanned and stored in digital format in order to preserve them and make them more accessible to the world. Since some of the words in these texts are difficult for computers to process, we are using the results of your efforts to help decipher them.


I am now appeased and will no longer get mad at google for challenging me with these words every time I want to leave a comment!

4 comments:

Dad said...

That is really interesting. Never knew that.

Richard said...

Forgive me for sounding sceptical, but if that's the case, how does it know when you get them wrong?

Richard said...

Strange. I deliberately entered incorrect words (although only with a couple of letters incorrect) for the above message and it still seems to have posted fine. Then I tried to post this message with 2 completely incorrect words and it wouldn't let me. I tried again with two almost-correct words, and again it did't work.

Given the problems I usually have with these things, I probably just misread the word and in entering what I thought was an incorrect word, actually entered the correct one!

Michelle said...

it's weird right? I thought the same thing, if it's asking us to enter them correctly then they must already have them in the database?
Thanks for wasting your time trying though Rich!!!