Google Updates Its reCAPTCHA Technology to Keep Bots Away

• Google announced reCAPTCHA v3 which offers better protection from bots than ever before.
• The technology was first introduced in 2007 as a means of keeping bots away from the internet.
• The new system does not require any form of user interaction and is seamless in nature.

One of the biggest annoyances when browsing the internet is being greeted with a reCAPTCHA window. Originally developed by Google, this technology that was designed to ward off bots from the internet has often led to internet users being frustrated.

In the first iteration of the reCAPTCHA system, users were required to decipher garbled text and type it out in a text box. Eventually, Google moved on to an image-based system where you have to identify images that match a given category. The system was flawed and often led to users being forced to waste time going over dozens of images for no reason at all.

Google announced the latest version of reCAPTCHA which has finally done away with manual verification and users will no longer need to perform any actions to get past the security checks. The new variant of the anti-bot software will use a proprietary technology that will learn user behavior and website traffic data to scan for bots. Any unusual activity will cause the software to block out bots from websites implementing reCAPTCHA v3.

According to Google “reCAPTCHA learns by seeing real traffic on your site. For this reason, scores in a staging environment or soon after implementing may differ from production. As reCAPTCHA v3 doesn't ever interrupt the user flow, you can first run reCAPTCHA without taking action and then decide on thresholds by looking at your traffic in the admin console. By default, you can use a threshold of 0.5.”

Websites will have full control over how bots are handled, which is the highlight of the new iteration of Google’s anti-bot software. The beta for the system started long back in May and should go live on various websites soon.

What do you think about the new reCAPTCA v3 by Google? Let us know in the comments below. If you could share the article online, it would also be great so others can find it too. Come chat with us on Facebook and Twitter.