Great piece, and the reason iThenticate pattern recognition is so valuable. Our software is effective in identifying word substitution and/or sentence addition. See http://plagiarism.org/plag_solutions.html for details. Also, do you consider synonimizers and article spinners to be one in the same?

“To exist, or not to exist, that is the query,â€? could be written as “The query is that to exist, or not to existâ€? without removing any word. That is worse English than the original synonym translation, but it is still readable. It would even be better if “that” was dropped.

Another example I just discovered while trying to figure out how to spell plagiarist. I got close and spell checked it in WordPerfect, then I looked at its thesaurus entries for the word. It included as a synonym, literary pirate. Multi word replacements are going to be even harder to detect in any automated method.

But it is a start and would catch a lot of the spam since it would deal with identical plagiarism as well as synonymized plagiarism. Search engines need to do something, not only to fight plagiarism, but to maintain at least mostly spam free search results. The problem though is how to determine what is plagiarism spam and what is legitimate syndication.

Even the best random text generators can’t create a meaningful paragraph except possibly by accident. Even though these synonymized articles clearly don’t appear well written, they are good enough to trick humans who don’t know about all these spammer/plagiarist tricks. And many good blogs are written by people who are not native English speakers so strange sentence structure and odd word connotation is not that unusual.

Another interesting method would be to find some article in another language and translate it to English. Some free translation services are pretty good at converting certain languages to English. The opposite could be done too. No reason to limit plagiarism to English content. This could be nearly impossible to detect since sentence structures would be changed and certainly almost all the words. And even if the original author found the derivative work, he may not recognize it.

I think the ping idea you had has some merit, but remember the vast majority of blog plagiarism victims will never find out and I suspect most who do will not have the resources or inclination to go any further than contact the offender’s host if even that much.

It is interesting that you mentioned in this post you are a writer. Further up in this post I was just thinking, I bet this guy is a writer. Your posts are always interesting, well written, and clearly thought out.