According to a recent announcement on the Official Google Blog, the Internet search giant has acquired reCAPTCHA - a small academic company, which essentially provides identity verification services as well as improved digitization.

The company that came into being as a consequence of research at Carnegie-Mellon is basically involved in developing software that attempts at differentiating humans from algorithms on web submissions; thereby minimizing the chances of a spam.

The recent move of reCAPTCHA into the Google fold is projected to be a beneficial development for Google since the small company amalgamates two processes that would be of great interest to Google, namely - authenticating that the information provided to a server has been entered by a human; and identifying hard-to-interpret content from book digitization projects.

The acronym CAPTCHA stands for 'Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart'; and comprises those random letters that users need to enter when they submit a form or make a comment on a webpage. Going by the Wikipedia, CAPTCHAs is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to verify that the response is not computer generated.

The acquisition of reCAPTCHA by Google will see the entire reCAPTCHA team moving into Google, along with the academic projects' founder, Luis von Ahn who will become a Google employee, but will also continue as a Carnegie-Mellon faculty member.