Phone Books in Recaptcha?

[The Evil Prince Zorte]

I just got a Captcha with a phone number in it. When I googled the number, it was for Bloomfield-Montclair Ford in New Jersey. When I entered it, I got bounced for a "possible hacker attempt"

I wonder if directories are being scanned, and not just literature.

[Nanoda]

There's lots of stuff in there. Google has recently been getting house addresses decoded this way.

[janeslogin]

Somewhere at one of the more serious online sites, perhaps nytimes or washingtonpost or newyorker there was a article within the last several days on how someone was using Captcha to correct old words that the OCR scanning got wrong. Perhaps try Googling reCaptcha for a starter should you be really keen on learning about it.

[Mr Downtown]

A lot of old trade directories, as well as periodicals with ads, are part of the Google Books and Archive initiatives. But all the recaptchas I see seem to amalgamate portions of words so they would not be recognizable as words. I'd be quite surprised to see seven digits in a row that were originally lined up that way. More likely to have the end of one number and the beginning of another.

Every once in a while I get one in Fraktur. I just marvel that they somehow know I can read it.