PlagSpotter Launches New & Improved Design+Functionality

On November 13, 2012 Jonathan Bailey (@plagiarismtoday), an editor of PlagiarismToday.com, wrote an excellent review of PlagSpotter comparing it to a well-established plagiarism checking service, CopyScape. In his review, Jonathan described a series of tests he conducted on both PlagSpotter and CopyScape and outlined pros and cons of our service. This blog post intends to respond to Jonathan’s findings and suggestions as well as provide some insights on the new features that we have introduced in the early 2013.

I. UI Issues

In addition to completely revamping our website design, we have introduced a new duplicate content report view – Sources View. This report view allows to see a list of sites that duplicate your content in a Google SERPs-like format.

When a user clicks on any of the sources, he/she will get an iframe view of the found source page where we will hightlight the parts of the text that is duplicated. The user can then reference this iframe view or send a DMCA notice to the offending party.

The Originality View report provides a copy of the content checked with highlights in it of the parts that are duplicated on other sites.

II. Speed Issues

We have drastically improved the speed of our checking algorithm. When a user uses our Sources View, we process and display the results in a matter of seconds, so that the user can start going through the sources while our system completes the full analysis on the background. CopyScape’s virtual speeds seems to be faster since CopyScape only scans the full source URL when a user clicks on it; whereas, we scan and show the % of duplicate content for all available sources and allow you to sort the URLs based on the % of duplication. This is a useful feature for prioritizing your cases.

III. Number of Sources Found

We have increased the number of duplicate sources that we find and show  for each check by 60% bringing the results on par with CopyScape Premium, and in some cases we show even more sources than CopyScape Premium does.

IV. Missing Features

We have launched our API and already have happy users using it.

In addition, we’ve polished up our email notification feature, which allows our paid users who monitor their URLs for duplicate content  to indicate at which % of duplicate content for each URL they should receive an email notification report.

Our Guru users can see a history of the duplicate content % change for each URL that they monitor:

In the near future we plan to launch a new set of features. One specific improvement that we’d like to make is to introduce the Batch search functionality which would allow users to copy/paste a list of URLs that need to be checked or upload a sitemap.xml file. Currently, we setup custom plan solutions to accommodate the users who have thousands of URLs that need to be checked.

V. Protected by PlagSpotter Badge

Our users can now embed the “Protected by PlagSpotter” badge on their sites to warn potential plagiarists from copying their content. We have seen an increased interest in using the badge by the writer communities and bloggers. You can go to the badge page to grab the code that suits your design needs.

Conclusion

Overall, we’ve started 2013 with lots of ambitions and challenging plans. One highlight in our plans for 2013 is to find an investor interested in PlagSpotter. A number of new features and algorithm improvements are coming up as well.