Google News

Bot Fooling Captchas Fools Google As Well

Switzerland is the lucky country with this "option"

By Vlad Constandes, SEO News Editor

27th of November 2007, 18:51 GMT

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It's very good to know that some things work exactly as they should and are not corrupted or surpassed by the technological evolution we have going on at the moment. It's a sight for sore eyes and when a simple Captcha manages to fool the great Google, it sort of fills my heart with joy. Not because I have anything against Google as a whole and I'd like to see its downfall, but every once in a while I like to see something

non-Google created that does its job.

A Captcha, in case you didn't know, is "a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human. "CAPTCHA" is a contrived acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University. The process involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade, but not able to solve on its own. Because computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human," according to Wikipedia.

I could have explained it better and in fewer words, but perhaps you're into the tech talk. It's the picture with letters and numbers that you have to make out and type in whenever you try to authenticate your signing up on any site or forum.

The Google News Bot in Switzerland is falling for the little buggers and presenting them as seemingly relevant news story thumbnails. A big ROFLMAO there, I might add. It's true that the Swiss Google hasn't been up and running for such a long time, but taking account of the previous experience, the Mountain View company's engineers should have eliminated this problem from the start. It's not like that, you know.

Later edit: It looks like they've managed to fix it in the meanwhile.

TAGS:

google | news | switzerland | captcha

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