CyberPlagiarism: Search engine tutorial

The following is an example of how search engines can be utilized to detect plagiarism. Note, however, that detecting plagiarism using only a search engine is not an effective method in all cases. Much of the internet (estimates range from 60% - 80%) is not indexed by traditional search engines such as Google. These sites are often termed the invisible or deep web. Sites that are included in this category are database driven sites, which generate site content according to the users request. Nonetheless, checking a number of search engines is a free and easy method of determining plagiarism in many cases.

Example of plagiarism from BigNerds.com paper

One of the many free paper mills that can be found online is BigNerds.com. For the purposes of this example, let us imagine that a student has found the BigNerds paper on the legality of marijuana essay topic that you have assigned. The student has simply copied this paper, printed it and handed it in. Let's see how effective various search engines are in discovering this plagiarism.

First, let's choose a distinctive phrase from the paper. Generally, a 4 to 8 word phrase is best, as some search engines have limits on the number of words they will search for in a single phrase. In this case, we will use the 8 word phrase "partake in the activity of smoking this plant" as found in the first sentence of this paper.

Searching Google for this excerpt as a phrase (ie. in quotation marks):

generated only 13 results, with the appropriate BigNerd essay leading the list. Searching Google without the phrase enclosed in caption marks:

yielded over 2000 results, though in this case the BigNerd site topped the list once again. However, you can see from the number of results that using quotation marks when attempting to find a particularly suspicious phrase is important. We would not always be so lucky as to have found the original paper at the top of the list, and browsing through 13 results is much more feasible than browsing through 2000.

Performing the same search (with quotation marks) in Dogpile gave 3 results, with BigNerds at the top of the list. This is not much of a surprise, since Dogpile incorporates Google in its search. Trying again using Complete Planet, a search engine that promotes itself as a search for the "deep web", gave no results. Take this as a good example that since engines index different types of information (surface or deep web), one search engine will not be able to be effective in all situations. It entirely depends on how the student went about finding the information that they plagiarized.

For more information...

If you are still unsure about how to use search engines to detect plagiarism, you may wish to look at some of the following resources: