Bitscan Seeks Testers

By Jonathan Bailey • Jan 8th, 2008 • Category: Articles, Products

New plagiarism-detection service Bitscan is seeking help in tuning and refining its service.

To do that, they are encouraging users to take advantage of a their free scan offer and submit feedback on the quality of the results they have received.

Anyone who is familiar with Copyscape should have little trouble using the service. You simply visit the site, paste in the URL you want to check and Bitscan does all of the work.

Bitscan also has the ability to check offline content by providing a box to paste in your content from any document on your computer. However, it does not have the ability to receive uploads of word processing files at this time.

Currently every user gets 20 free scans. Though that should be more than adequate, my tests would only require about 10 to 15 scans, if it is not you can write the operators of the site and see if they can help.

I am holding off on a more thorough analysis of the service for a few weeks at the request of the developers of the service. Right now they are still tuning the product and don’t expect the service to return the best results that it can.

With that in mind, if you do decide to test the service, take a moment and send them feedback on the product. Let them know how well it performed and what they can do to improve it. Also, I’m certain any feedback on the look, speed, and easy of use would also be appreciated.

I’ll come back in a few weeks with a more thorough analysis of the service, including the results of my own testing and information about future plans for the service.

In the meantime, pound away on the service and be sure to let them know what you think!

Jonathan Bailey is The Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today, which he founded in 2005 as a way to help Webmasters going through content theft problems get accurate information and stay up to date on the rapidly-changing field. He is also a consultant to Webmasters and companies to help them devise practical content protection strategies and develop good copyright policies.
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6 Responses »

  1. According to cybele on January 8th, 2008 at 2:41 pm:

    I gave it a go. It mostly comes up with pulls of the digest of my feed in all the usual places.

    The thing I keep waiting for these services to find is something like this page:

    http://chocolateall.com/

    If I run THAT page through Bitscan, it pulls up all the places where it was scraped from my site. How come bitscan didn’t tell me about them in the first place?

  2. According to Sue on January 8th, 2008 at 2:54 pm:

    I agree with Cybele. It works about as well as copyscape does(n’t).
    I typed in a post I know had been scraped (thanks to Akismet) and it showed nada copies of the post.
    I’m not impressed…it will be of no help whatsoever in helping find duplicate copies. I will continue to rely on Akismet trapping and technorati’s incoming links (a great help).

  3. According to JB on January 9th, 2008 at 3:22 am:
    Cybele: That is strange. Do you know if Copyscape does that as well? I have to wonder if there is something about your site that is limiting Bitscan’s ability to grab the content. However, I have no idea what that would be.

    I’m going to forward this to their staff and see what they have to say about.

    Let’s hope it is something they can address.

    Sue:

    Another strike. Too bad. Like I said, I haven’t done any serious testing of it at the request of those behind the site. But I’m not as enthused as I once was.

    Once again though, I’m hoping that this is something they can iron out…

  4. According to Mark on January 9th, 2008 at 12:50 pm:

    Cybele/Sue: Thanks so much for taking the time to give BitScan a try. We’re looking at the logs of your tests to gain more insight into your results.

    One thing to be aware of when using the free service is that a maximum of 10 results are returned. The premium service that is launching soon will include many more results.

    Thanks again and please don’t hesitate to contact us with any comments or feedback.

  5. According to cybele on January 9th, 2008 at 1:02 pm:

    Jonathan - I get similar results with Copyscape, in that I can put in ChocolateAll and it matches that content as being related to my site. But when I search Copyscape it never brings up ChocolateAll.

    Basically none of the plagiarism-detection services have done any better than just keeping a google keyword alert active and every once in a while checking on some special phrases on my own and a couple of RSS-fed technorati tags.

  6. According to JB on January 9th, 2008 at 3:35 pm:
    Mark: Thank you very much for stopping by and answering the comments, I know it is greatly appreciated. Please let me know what, if any, improvements you are able to make!

    Cybele: Hm, I don’t know what to tell you. I know that Copyscape uses the Google API so it could be a limitation of Google. If that is the case, keep your eyes open as some services are coming up that don’t depend on Google in any way at all. They might break the deadlock…

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