I am planning to hire freelance writers for my site. I was wondering how would you check if the work is original or not?
well, I tried that for two urls(there are free sites who iclude this feature for free), but I saw that in a non related article compared to my article were 10-15% the same. It was weird. But never tried those programs where you need to pay.
Copyscape.com will help you. You have a maximum amount of tries per month if you're a free user though, but if you think you're going to be checking for duplicate content a lot, then paying their fee is probably worth it.
You can check trying random, quoted phrases via search engines or using any of the folowing plagiarism tools for free: http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker http://blog.outer-court.com/quotefinder http://plagium.com http://plagiarism.phys.virginia.edu/links.html
To check an article for originality; do I put the whole article into Copyscape? Is that how it works? Sorry, but not sure about how checking is carried out - sentance by sentance, or whole thing. EDIT: JUST USED THE DUSTBALL LINK ABOVE, AND CAN CHECK THE WHOLE ARTICLE. THANKS!!!
You can copy the whole article and paste it into the text section or you could upload it onto your site and do a URL search (infinitely better - don't ask me why!!) The ideal word count is 2000 max so you could put 4 articles together at a time. Once you hit the URL search or the text search button, you'll get any duplicate content showing up below. OR, you could put the whole article thru articlechecker.com - not as good as Copyscape but it's free
I use Google, and it's easy. Take a phrase or an entire sentence of the article, copy and paste it into Google. It'll find if that article was used before. It's free too. You can set up Google Alerts as well, to make sure the article isn't resold. (Or someone steals it from your site and tries to use it on theirs.) Really, truely, the best way to ensure you don't get used copy on your site is to pay a decent wage for it, make sure you get a quality writer who takes pride in his or her work, and offer to put up a byline. I don't know why there's a rush from people asking for content to be ghostwritten. You can buy full rights to the article, but keep the original author's name attached to the piece. You will attract people who will try harder, because their name is attached to the article. The author will love it because it can be a clip he can show off to other potential buyers. Both parties can benefit from this. Unless you are going to claim to be the only expert on your site, there's no reason not to let someone keep their byline.
I did studied law for copyright before.. But It's truly hard to identify which article is original and which one is infringing work. Because there are a lot of works outside the world that we never see.. Unless it has been published to wide readers and we are able to get to know it.
Over 7,000 posts. You've been here for how long, cool_78, and you haven't seen the, God knows, how many past threads asking this?
Copyscape has free and paid versions, and the paid checks are cheap. On the upside, it's easy to use and you can check everything from one sentence to a whole article. However, it has been known to not catch everything all the time. Scutari - Just because it finds a small percentage the same does not mean much. Take this for instance... You input and run a check on your article, and your article has the phrase "Take this for instance..." (yes, as above), it can return a % of duplication from that. There are many commonly use phrases, that doesn't mean your article isn't unique. Hope that makes sense.
I use Copyscape, for various reasons. A) It's cheap. $5 for 100 searches? Not bad at all. B) Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc., do not always bring back the results that you'll get with Copyscape. People can re-write things in such a way that they'll look very similar, and change a few little words. Google won't catch that, but Copyscape will. C) When you use a search engine to check instead, you have to search over the whole document to see what's been copied, or altered. Copyscape highlights what has been copied so you don't have to do a lot of screwing around.
Article Checker is free. I'm a writer and I run my stuff through 2-3 sites even though I know it's original because I wrote it lol. Beware of bidding sites, they can really screw you.
try copyscape if you can afford to pay $5 for the 100 searches..or put a few lines at the search box of the google so that you will know if it has a duplicate or none..
I have used Copyscape and like that. You just put the url of the article page in. As for using phrases, I don't really think that gives you a true idea as to whether something is original or not. If it is a really unique phrase, then it might give some idea. But many phrases, as pointed out above, are common. Also, within the niche itself, some phrases specific to that niche will be fairly standard.
And you honestly believe Copyscape does? Ummmm, no. Copyscape-passed doesn't mean it's original (and keep in mind that in places like the US, re-written work - even if it passes Copyscape for search engines, is actually illegal). Phrases are the better option (especially since you can check on auto-pilot with alerts to be more productive), and any smart writer or content publisher will work in those unique phrases that are unlikely to be found in a lot of places elsewhere. If they care about the metrics, they'll put the forethought in - besides, it doesn't take that long to check a phrase in Google before you hit the publish button.
Till date i have used copy scape it is working fine for me. So do you mean if i quote some one lines like a quotation or a famous saying it will be considered a copied stuff?? Another question i am writing for a science fiction website which has a dictionary for words like force, acceleration, like i cannot change the definition nor should be rephrased so will that be considered copied??
Who said anything about famous sayings? We're talking about adding completely unique phrases to your work, so that you have something specific to check. And when you're writing glossary entries, you shouldn't be copying word-for-word from anywhere. They can absolutely be rephrased (search for definitions of "marketing" and you'll probably find a LOT). Does that mean it's a unique concept or completely original? Probably not. But definitions also aren't articles with an "idea" behind them... they're just defined terms.