Google acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to help protect websites from spam and fraud. reCAPTCHA’s unique technology improves the process that converts scanned images into plain text, known as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This technology also powers large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search. The service offers a simple JavaScript API that allows you to embed CAPTCHAs in any web page and many popular sites use it: Facebook, Twitter, Ticketmaster, announced.