In its simplest form plagiarism is copying other’s work without giving credit to them. When you go into the details of it, there are different types and levels of plagiarism. All major search engines consider plagiarism very seriously as a ranking factor. Its very important for you to load content into your website that is free of plagiarism. There are many free online plagiarism checkers that are available to check for plagiarism. Here is a short review of such plagiarism checkers.

www.copyscape.com Provides a free plagiarism checker of URLs. When you enter the web page URL that you want to check for plagiarism, you get a report of all the occurrences of copied content from the web. There is a premium version and they charge 5c per search.

www.duplichecker.com Provides searching text for plagiarism. There are options to insert a .txt file for checking. You can search for with quotes and without quotes. There are options to check plagiarism from three major search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN.

www.articlechecker.com A free online plagiarism checker that provides both text and URL checking options. No MSN search available. You can check for plagiarism from Google and Yahoo searches. I am surprised that they only have one page and not other links. I can not find any other links other than the google text and display ads that I can click. There is a checker.php page that returns the results. Am wondering if this this one of those plagiarism checker major’s proxy site.

www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker Clean layout. Intented to check student’s paper, homework assignments, essays and other works. Hence there is only a text search that is available. A premium version is available at $8 a month which has features like ignoring text in quotes and uploading Microsoft word files. Not a competitive feature as these are available for free from the competitors.

www.plagiarisma.net This free online plagiarism checker has all three types of checking, text, URL and file upload. One clear difference that I can see is that the plagiarism text search is supporting 190+ languages. Also there are many formats of files that are accepted for checking plagiarism .txt, .html, .rtf, .doc, .odt and .docx. I don’t see any ads or paid subscriptions. That makes me wonder how they are making money. May be there is one when you sign up.

www.plagiarismchecker.com What a nice domain name these guys have bought. This keyword “plagiarism checker” has close to 1,00,000 searches. Anyways this is again an online plagiarism checker that has all the options. You can check documents and web pages for plagiarism. They have some out dated news and articles on the website, but on the first sight they seem useful.

www.scanmyessay.com Provide a free download of a desktop plagiarism checker software called Viper. They promise that viper will be a free alternative to the famous turnitin plagiarism checker. Interestingly viper is free. Once downloaded, check to see if there is a request to renew or upgrade for a premium version.

How to report plagiarism ?

When browsing through the information on plagiarism checkers that are available for free in the market, i found some ways with which you can report plagiarism. It would be frustrating to see a web page that copied content from you page to come on top of your page in the search results. While you are fuming with that, you have a choice to report it to search engines like google. You just need to fill out a form and the necessary steps will be taken. Here is the form that google accepts to check reports on plagiarism and other such mischievous activities over the Internet.  Google Plagiarism Report Form