CAPTCHA test / Museum / reCAPTCHA v1
reCAPTCHA v1
The CAPTCHA that put the internet to work: one word checked the human, the other was a scan that OCR could not read, and the typed answer digitised books and newspapers. Over 100 million puzzles a day at its peak.
Made by
Carnegie Mellon University, then Google (September 2009)
Years
27 May 2007; shut down 31 March 2018
Type
Distorted text, two words
Can I install it?
No, retired; Google now offers v2 and v3
What it cost a visitor
Two words to type; around 10 seconds per solve, 100M+ solves a day in 2008
Use today
reCAPTCHA v3 (score) or a reputation check such as CleanTalk
What it asked
Type two distorted words. One was known to the system and verified you; the other came from a scanned book or newspaper, and your answer was used to digitise it.
How it was broken
OCR and later deep learning caught up with distorted text. Google moved verification to behaviour analysis ("No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA", December 2014) and scoring (v3, October 2018), and declared v1 end-of-life on 31 March 2018.
What to use today
Invisible scoring (reCAPTCHA v3), a managed browser check (Turnstile), or a cloud check of the sender that needs nothing from the visitor (CleanTalk).
Still running something from this room?
If your form still asks visitors to read, click or drag, see what it costs them in seconds, then try the option with no CAPTCHA at all. 7-day free trial, no card, then $12 per website per year.
1,105,000+ websites protectedup to 99.97% accuracylive in 60 seconds7-day free trial, no card
Sources: von Ahn, Maurer, McMillen, Abraham, Blum, "reCAPTCHA: Human-Based Character Recognition via Web Security Measures", Science, 2008; Google reCAPTCHA v1 shutdown notice (31 March 2018); Wikipedia: reCAPTCHA. Related: reCAPTCHA v2, reCAPTCHA v3, Museum.