A Search Engine for Detecting Sites Using Your Content

There used to be a site that allowed you to enter a chunk of text and find other sites on the 'Net using that same text-chunk. I think that site's gone away. Anyone who wants to see if their content is being repurposed anywhere might instead want to try the new Copyscape, currently in beta ( http://www.copyscape.com/ ).

Copyscape is by the folks who bring you Google Alert, and uses the Google API. It works simply; enter in the page you want to check on and Copyscape returns pages which are using that content. I put in ResearchBuzz.com, and it entered twelve pages, mostly sites which are using the ResearchBuzz RSS feeds. (For an interesting result, try searching for the URL of an RSS feed.) Results include title, description, and URL, but when you click on the title you won't go immediately to the Web page. Instead you'll go to a cached copy which shows the copied parts in colored blocks.

I think this'll be popular but I'd love it if you could set the copy density. At least one search result didn't reproduce any ResearchBuzz content at all, but repeated the name of an exhibit that had been mentioned. It would be good if you could set a minimum copy block size for a match (200 characters, 500 characters, whatever). Since this site is brought to you by Google Alert, I would infer that eventually there would be e-mail alerts and RSS feeds, but I don't see any evidence of them yet.

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