Few things more hated and at the same time necessary on the Internet than CAPTCHAS. The bot detection system has become essential on many websites to avoid the massive entry of fake users and automated bots. reCAPTCHA, Google’s tool to solve this, has been one of the most used for years. However, hCAPTCHA has been quietly moving up the ranks . They claim to have a 15% market share and boast more privacy than Google.
In a recent announcement, hCAPTCHA indicates that it is the largest independent CAPTCHA service on the Internet. For this, they say they are operating on 15% of the Internet, a share that they presume to have largely removed from Google and its now mythical reCAPTCHA. A big driver to increase their market share was undoubtedly the integration into Cloudflare. Internet giant Cloudflare decided to leave Google’s reCAPTCHA in April this year and go for hCAPTCHA.
The CAPTCHA service that pays webmasters
hCAPTCHA has a number of advantages over Google’s solution. Perhaps the most interesting of all has to do with the cost of the service itself: free. It is the reason why Cloudflare decided to use hCAPTCHA. Google’s reCAPTCHa was previously free, although in recent months they announced their payment plans for large web pages with traffic. Given the vastness of Cloudflare, they decided to switch to some free option.
hCAPTCHa is not only a free service, it also pays webmasters to use it. As explained on their FAQ page, the CAPTCHAS that are solved by hCAPTCHA are human tasks that need to be solved by a third party. For a certain number of times that a CAPTCHA is resolved and depending on the difficulty it has, hCAPTCHA stops the web administrator in tokens. These tokens can be converted into money or donated to a non-profit organization.
This should not surprise anyone. Solving CAPTCHAS helps train algorithms to better understand human behavior or improve their pattern recognition. hCAPTCHA says that they, unlike Google, do not keep the benefits of it, but distribute it to their customers.
On the other hand, they boast when it comes to privacy. Comparing themselves once again to Google, they say that they track us IPs and your internet browsing to determine if it is a bot or not. Google with its reCAPTCHA V3, because of how it is designed, does it. The idea behind reCAPTCHA V3 is to understand if someone is human by how they behave on the Internet and not by the CAPTCHAS it solves. That is why in a way reCAPTCHA V3 is a massive cookie for Google.
All that said, for the end user both Google’s hCAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA are just as tedious. They are based on the idea of visually recognizing items in images. hCAPTCHA has the typical “mark all images where ____ appears” problem, but it also offers other options. For example, it can show an image and ask you to place it in one of the four categories it shows. It can also ask you to mark on an image where a certain object is located, or select it in the image.
CAPTCHAs are no longer as effective as they used to be, many bots equipped with AI manage to pose as humans. There is an AI that takes 0.05 seconds to solve a CAPTCHA. Hence, they are increasingly complex, longer to solve and more tedious.