Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

Wavy word pop ups.

Status
Not open for further replies.

tcmtech

Banned
Most Helpful Member
I was told an interesting story about those wavy word pop ups you see all the time on most websites a few days ago.

Apparently they are not a security feature but part of a massive world wide attempt to use the mass public to help fill in the odd words that text recognition software has trouble with when converting old books, documents, and typeset text into modern electronic media.

Being that very old documents and books where printed one at a time with manually set letter blocks it was common for the text to shift around from one page to the next as it was being printed.
Plus being that they where often pushed into the paper a bit too hard at times creases would occasionally form and some text would end up being printed over a crease and cause a splitting of the letter or letters near by.

because of these shifted letters, faded letters, blurry letters, and physical anomalies text recognition cant accurately recognize the individual letters and translate them. It can only identify that there is a word there.
That selected mystery word block gets sent to a master data collection system that in turn sends that word out to the sites that have that wavy word pop up and when someone reads it and types in its assumed correct spelling it is then sent back to the data base and used to fill in its formerly missing spot in the sentence of what ever book or document that it related to thats presently being converted.

Way cool! :)
 
It started out as a security feature, and it's not a conspiracy at all, I read articles many months ago that they were intending on doing things just like that with it, because it's of benefit to everyone, I know they're not all part of some massive project, there may be a few companies that offer it though.

Very similar in nature, though not in practice to this kind of thing. Put the human brain to work =) The bulk majority of galaxies will be properly classified, and scientist can then pick the ones that have software weights of people picking the same answer to see if there's something worth studying. Weeds out the junk without a rocket scientist looking at everyone.

Can You Classify That Galaxy? Artsnova Digital Art and Space
 
Last edited:
Sounds like **broken link removed**.

It serves two purposes, security for websites and to help scan old text that OCR has trouble recognizing.

The benefits are obvious: if the OCR can't figure out the words when they scan old books, chances are the spambots can't figure them out to get into websites either. And if they do, well, they end up helping the cause, when otherwise they're totally useless.
 
I'm not to sure about the actual security purpose though. I have misspelled many of the words on purpose the first time around just to see if they are security devices at most sites.
I typicaly still get sent to the next screen without so much as a raised eyebrow! ;)

So if you are ever reading a electronic version of an old book or document and you find misspelled words, well... I am to blame for a few of them! :D
 
I've typed them correctly multiple times and gotten sent away =)
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top