Why Google should offer Captcha API

I’m just implementing some features on a soon to be released site and I found myself (poetentially needlessly) worried about Spam content being forced into the site and ruining it’s value.

As always there really are only 3 options.

1. Make users jump through a bunch of hoops, in such a way that a robot unless programmed just to attack my 18 hour constructed web app, would never get through all the steps needed to post the spam. But that sucks for users and my site only really needs 1 form, so why mash it to pieces and make it hard for people just to try to block machines.
2. Add email notification and confirmation response. Upon submission an email would be sent to a user who must click on a link to prove that they really are who they are. But that sucks for users, who want instant gratification and might not want to give me their email addresses, and anyway my email will probably get picked up as spam and get me blocked from AOL servers (which is never fun).
3. Add a captcha. Whilst captchas are becoming more the norm, they are still a pain for users, you have to consider accessibility issues, you end up writing your own - or you use an “open source one” and then worry that you’re just helping the spammers break someone elses captcha.

I find myself wondering why Google (first big search related name that came to mind, go figure) hasn’t developed a Google Captcha API that people can embed with a nice simple piece of JS and somehow tie into there form submission process.

Why would google do that for you?

For google relevance and accuracy of search result returns is probably their number one goal. The goal of the content spammer, is to try and get their links on as many unsuspecting sites as possible all pointing to their sites and thus upping their google rank and making their links appear incorrectly near the top of the results pages.

It is in Google best interest to prevent content spam from continuing to spread.

They have the money, the brains and the inside understanding of the processes to “hopefully” be able to implement a solution that could, if adpoted, wipe out content spam and thus vastly improve the relevance and accuracy of their search results.

Google already has in place for it’s own applications Captchas, and even captchas that have accessibilty features (which are rather well implemented).

They could easily become the de facto captcha system for the web, if they released both a client site and server side API that could somehow be tied into form submissions. How that would be done? I don’t know off the top of my head, but google doesn’t need me to tell them that part.