Simply put, any and all of these search results should have come back as being plagiarized. It appears that text that is not widely distributed around the Web may or may not show up as plagiarized in this work, something that has me very worried as many are starting to rely on this plagiarism checker as their main tool for detecting both copyright infringement and the plagiarism of students. Every search term, in this test, came back positive. The only search using the service that seemed to work remotely well was when I ran the Declaration of Independence through it. To make matters worse, using some of the sample quotes from the test, I was able to locate other copies of the work, such as with the first quote.Ĭlearly, The Plagiarism Checker was missing results that Google was finding, meaning it was discarding them for whatever reason.Ī similar test for another prose work only returned one sentence that was matched against anything and the results for it were all false positives. The result was stunning.ĭespite the fact Google had reported three dozen matches on test snippets from the work itself, the “Dustball” checker was unable to find anything. I then shifted gears and started using prose works, the first being one that had 36 matches in Google at the time I did the search. However, that test was thwarted as The Plagiarism Checker refused to even look at the work, saying that it could not function with such short text strings. The first test was to run an old poem of mine through the system, one that allegedly has over 300 matches in Google. To test the service, I decided to run it through a similar battery of tests that I had run Copyscape through and then watched as they improved upon the initial results. Still, a bit of research will be welcomed if the service produces great results, unfortunately, it seems that the service performs only lukewarm, at best. Where Copyscape, as well as academic tools such as TurnItIn, provide very simple and colorful results, The Plagiarism Checker is a very bare-bones approach, requiring the user to perform a large amount of research on their own. That alone is a big part of the problem Webmasters, and many teachers, will have with the service. However, where Copyscape’s keeps the “magic” hidden from the user, the “Dustball” plagiarism checker includes links to the Google results, encouraging users to click through and research the case for themselves. In that regard, the idea is actually very similar to Copyscape, which also uses Google via their API, to process results. From there, the site extracts several strings of text, runs them through Google and compiles the result, determining whether plagiarism is probable. In short, you take an essay, article or other lengthy prose work, paste it into a textbox and hit “check”.
This free plagiarism detector will find plagiarized text in homework and other essays/reports. The basic premise of the minimalist site can be summed up by its instructions:Ĭut & paste your students paper or homework assignment into the box below, and click the “check” button. Librarians and teachers are especially captivated by this site.īut is “The Plagiarism Checker” worth using? Is it as powerful of a tool as some, although not the site itself, have made it to be? The sad answer is no, but it could, with a few simple tweaks, become a much more useful service for teachers and bloggers alike.
The site, according to Klug, was getting about 2,000 visits per day when it was forgotten but is almost certainly doing much better now as it has taken off, attracting countless Twitter Tweets and other social news attention. It was about a service called “ The Plagiarism Checker” (dubbed by me the “Dustball” checker due to its domain), created by Brian Klug in 2002, when he was a student at the University of Maryland at College Park, and abandoned until recently this year.
Late last week, a post reached the front page of Reddit that piqued the curiosity of copyright holders, teachers and professors alike.