It’s really not a bad idea, but it’s not exactly a new one either. We’ve seen examples of this in the past, though I can’t honestly say I’ve encountered it much in everyday web browsing. 

Last year, Microsoft  applied for a patent for CAPTCHA advertising. Solve Media itself was talking about the concept months ago, back when it was called Adcopy.com.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is that we haven’t seen Google do this kind of thing yet. Last year, shortly after Microsoft filed for that patent, Google acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provided CAPTCHAs to over 100,000 sites around the web. 

Google had other things in mind with that acquisition, however. This inolved reading and archiving printed materials. That’s not to say it isn’t something that could still happen. 

Perhaps you’re thinking that Google was inspired by a patent recently granted to Microsoft for advertising via the CAPTCHA. Maybe Google will be the first to offer AdWords in CAPTCHAs. Maybe "relevant" CAPTCHA text.

No, it appears that Google has something else in mind, and it involves the reading and archiving of printed materials. Luis von Ahn, co-founder of reCAPTCHA, and Will Cathcart, Google Product Manager explain:

Since computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain millions of email accounts for spamming. But there’s a twist — the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text.

In this way, 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. Having the text version of documents is important because plain text can be searched, easily rendered on mobile devices and displayed to visually impaired users. So we’ll be applying the technology within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process.

Well, they didn’t exactly rule the ad thing out, but it does appear that the acquisition is more in line with Google’s conquest to organize the world’s information. Google did not reveal financial terms of the acquisition.

 Google’s CAPTCHA Broken

MessageLabs deserves credit for discovering the rise, which occurred between January and February.  According to the company’s report, "The surge in spam from Gmail accounts follows the pattern seen in July 2007 when it appears attackers developed a similar methodology to circumvent the CAPTCHA mechanisms for Yahoo! and Hotmail email accounts."

Now, for whatever it’s worth to Googlers and people who abhor junk mail, Yahoo, MSN, and Hotmail remain much more common sources of spam.  Also, Google appears anxious to combat security problems; only yesterday, a post titled "How Google keeps your information secure" appeared on the Official Google Blog.

MessageLabs’s finding represents the fall of a major barrier, though, with free email services now being almost universally untrustworthy.  Businesspeople who can be reached at "@gmail.com" may be especially worried – Gmail addresses won’t have the same shine now that spammers are gaining ground.

Going forward, a key thing will be to see if (or how quickly) their advance continues.