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Nice venture-capital-boosting announcement there, but CopyScape has already been doing this for years, albeit for text only.

Anyone else ever had their site visited by the Turnitin bot?

And the article mentioned Copyscape, which is more aimed at finding dupes of web pages (you enter a website, and it looks for similar pages in their index).

After all they just copied http://copyscape.com/ 's idea.

I've recently come across Copyscape, an interesting site which searches for other pages that duplicate content from a page you direct it to, even just a portion of the page. Some of its services require payment, but the basic search appears to be free.

This problem has been around awhile, and is part of the larger problem of search engines filtering out duplicate content. Great for the users, but it can be a real problem for site owners suffering from plagiarism or content theft. There's some information at the Copyscape plagiarism search service about what you can do about it.

This problem has been around awhile, and is part of the larger problem of search engines filtering out duplicate content. Great for the users, but it can be a real problem for site owners suffering from plagiarism or content theft. There's some information at the Copyscape plagiarism search service about what you can do about it.

his content ?

Roland Piquepaille has just cut and pasted the cornell press release and some other one,
do a google phrase search , all will be revealed
or just wack in Rolands site in this plagiarism detector and see for yourself how he rips off other peoples content and reposts it for profit without permission
and then he has the cheek to put (c)Roland at the bottom of his shitty "blog"

enter his website here and see the reams of copied articles

no wonder he cant get a real job, he must be poor

But who will be the first to throw open the floodgates and actuallly provide unlimited API querying at a price? Businesses (such as (plagiarism detection), (rank tracking) and (advanced alerting) are starting to be built out of this stuff, so there's obviously a genuine economy out there for the taking.

This means that you can't reliably hijack the page unless you have a higher PR than it. But if you have a higher PR than that page then could just as well copy its content, then wait till you're spidered, then substitute for whatever you want.

In other words, this is nothing more than another way to exploit two existing problems: (a) that you can steal anyone's content on the web (though see this for a way to detect it) and (b) you can cloak your site for the search engines (though I'm sure they notice that too).

In summary, there is nothing new in this whatsoever.

Until the other search engines release competing APIs (hopefully with a higher than 1000 query limit), Google will remain top dog from the POV of /. types.

CopyScape can do the recognizing of copied stuff, but it's purpose is only finding website plagarism. This, however, would definately find all the wikipedia forks unless it's a really old copy and the page has had a major rewrite.

If google could integrate copyscape into their search, you would be happy.

My project TuxMobil: Linux with Laptops, Notebooks, PDAs, Mobile Phones and Portable Computers has been under the attack of content thieves some times. Therefore I have decided to sign all my pages with a steganographic watermark. Also I often watch out for stolen content using a special search engine, e.g. CopyScape. In case I detect a fraudulent site, I contact the FBI to Report Internet Fraud and the FTC's Consumer Complaints site (this applies only if the thief is located in the U.S.). And I complain to the thief's ISP.

One reason why this is in the interest of big old universities like Harvard is that it will make it much easier to detect plagiarism in students' essays. If published books were included in Google's index, a plagiarism detection service like Copyscape would also be able to check whether content was lifted from printed material, as well as from the web.

I reckon good applications of the Google Web APIs should also get a chance at the winnings - some crackers that spring to mind are Google Cookin recipe search, Copyscape web plagiarism search, the TouchGraph Google browser, and Google Alert for tracking topics. Isn't the point of both the Jam and the APIs to invite external developers to weave their magic around Google's platform?

This is an interesting (and possibly profitable) example of what Google Alert can do: CopyScape, locate copyright infringements on the web.

They may also start leveraging the success of popular services that use their Web APIs , such as Google Alert and Copyscape , particularly with the commercialization of Google Alert. Positioning themselves as a general technology platform for the web is surely a step in the right direction to further raising their valuation.

Will be interesting to see how quiet they stay from now till the actual IPO...

In fact, they already provide programmatic access to their results via the Web APIs, spawning services ranging from a recipe generator to a site for detecting online plagiarism. According to this story, the developers of Google Alert, one well-known APIs application, have recently been granted permission to commercialize their service. My guess is that it won't be long before there are many more 3rd party Google applications, bringing in a lot of new money to Google's coffers. Anyone for a BUY rating?

Google's usefulness is also being expanded by third party developers using their APIs to develop kitschy hits such as Google Fight and Googlism. But there are useful apps too... A recent release is Copyscape which uses Google to find people who have plagiarized your web content. It's from the same guys as Google Alert and works like magic. I reckon it won't be long (after the IPO?) before Google expand their APIs a lot further, to make image, news and group searching available to third party apps. Then things will get really interesting.

It seems that the web needs a serious search engine for detecting copycat sites, whether it's images, layout, Javascript or text that has been stolen. So far the only thing I know of is Copyscape which seems to work well for text (it uses the Google Web APIs) but can't handle images or code. Maybe there should be a publicly-funded project for this?