Google Blog just announced the acquisition by Google of ReCaptcha, an optical character recognition company. If you’ve ever tried to post, comment or subscribe to an online product and been asked to type in a duplicate of some squiggly letters or numbers to make sure you’re really a human, you’ve used optical character recognition.

“We’re excited to welcome the ReCaptcha team to Google, and we’re committed to delivering the same high level of performance that websites using reCAPTCHA have come to expect,” said Google product manager Will Cathcart, in the blog post. “Improving the availability and accessibility of all the information on the Internet is really important to us, so we’re looking forward to advancing this technology with the ReCaptcha team.”

Thanks to search engine marketer Bill Hartzer who brought this to our attention by way of JournalistTweets.com.