Using Google Alerts to Detect Plagiarism
Keep up to Date of Copyright Violations of Your Original Articles
Mar 18, 2009
Stopping plagiarism seems to be impossible through protective methods of defence. The only methods available are reactive, but at least there are such methods and you can be kept aware if your articles have been plagiarized. You can then do something about it and have the offending material removed.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a new service, still in beta, that will search for a string of characters as it crawls the internet and send you an email alert whenever a page is found that includes a matching string. It can search the whole web or just news, videos or images. You can decide on how often to be informed, either once a day, once a week or as it happens. Google will then either send you an email or you can add the alert to a feed and view it in your favourite feed reader. This appears to be designed so that people can keep track of news or changing content on competitor websites. However, this can also be used to alert writers if their original content is being copied.
Google Alerts for Writers
With Google Alerts you can enter any long unique string from one of your articles and let Google sniff out any copyright infringement for free. For the struggling online freelance writer this strikes me as a better option than some similar paid services. You won't be able to input the whole text but Google accepts a maximum of 2048 characters in its search queries which is more than adequate. This means try to pick fairly long sentences with what seem to be a unique combination of words. Remember to put the whole string in quotation marks otherwise it will search for the occurrences of each word anywhere in the document, rather than the words in the order written.
Google Alerts Advanced Search
If you start getting too many false flag alerts then you can just go into your Alerts account and edit the string of text, possibly expand it to include the next sentence. You can also use Google's Advanced Search features but you must then copy the whole query string including the advanced tags from the Google search box into your Alerts search. It is unlikely you would need the Advanced Search features but if you are making copies of your articles for article directories or revenue sharing websites then you can exclude those from the search.
Syndication Alerts
It is also entirely possible that one of your articles has been copied with the byline intact. Depending on how the article was copyrighted this may be a pleasant surprise. Google Alerts can therefore be used for both copyright violations as well as keeping track on where your articles have been syndicated.
Becoming aware if your original articles have been copied is just the first step towards taking measures to have the offending material removed, or sending a thank-you message to a fan. Luckily, there is now a free and automated way of doing this.
