by Plagium is a new web service that tracks “Plagiarisms” using the Yahoo! Search API. I tried Plagium this morning and I was disappointed in its lack of helpful returns and I was disappointed because I always love catching content thieves.
I started my non-scientific test by typing in a famous phrase, “Four score and seven years ago today…” to see where and how that phrase might be “plagiarized” on the web and in the news.
Plagium immediately informed me that a search could not really be performed — even though it appeared to try.
I gave up waiting for the churned results after 10 minutes.
Next, I decided to be more proactively forceful and use a story I wrote that I know has been stolen, in full, many times over: Jesus Found Dead in His Grave. I have the proof of those thefts — but does Plagium?
Let’s use Plagium’s “Search by URL” feature by cutting and pasting in the URL of my Jesus article:
Ooops!
Let me cut and paste a few sentences from the start of my Jesus article to see how Plagium does in finding content theft:
Parsing…
I gave up waiting for any result form Plagium after two hours of watching the circle churn.
In three attempts this morning, Plagium provided zero results even though I’m quite certain all my queries have been re-used, stolen, quoted, and scraped.
I’m not sure how you’d use Plagium, but I don’t find it a useful tool for finding any of my stolen content online.
David,
I just tried it 3 times and it got results for me in under a minute each time – including testing your dead in the grave article which was found in numerous articles by Plagium. Maybe it wasn’t feeling well earlier?
I wonder, Gordon! I’m glad you were able to get results. Perhaps my earlier failures woke it up!
In my testing, Plagium actually perfromed very well. I never saw the error you described above and it actually provided matches better or as good as Copyscape.
I have to wonder if what you saw might have been a temporary glitch as it has been working fine for me even these past few days. I’ve gotten the weekly updates fine.
Very odd.
Yes, Plagium was a massive disappointment. I appreciate your positive experience with the service, but I’m standing by my review because I have the screenshots to prove my frustration and I want evidence of the two hours of my life lost waiting for the site to respond to my queries!
Any chance you want to give it one more go? 🙂 Just to see if it works now?
Three tries is plenty. Wasted enough time on it.