FAQ

Plagium is a service of Septet Systems Inc. – a New York-based company that specializes in advanced search solutions for industry, the public sector, and government. We have aimed to provide an easy to use service that applies to a broad base of users.

Plagium is very easy to use. Simply follow these steps:

1. Select text from a file or Web page by running the mouse over it and paste into the Plagium text box. The text can be as long as you want to ensure full coverage of your search. However, remember that the longer the text, the longer the amount of time it will take Plagium to conduct its search.
2. Copy and paste this text into Plagium’s text input box.
3. Hit the Quick Search or the Deep Search button.
4. Wait a few seconds to minutes, while Plagium scours the Web to see if it finds matching text.
5. When completed with its Web search, Plagium will return links to documents where it has found text that matches or closely matches the text that you have submitted. This text may have been derived from a source that you own, another legitimate source, or an unauthorized source – you be the judge!

You can submit limited text queries to Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. These tools are excellent for searching single terms and expressions. However, when large text blocks are submitted you will notice some big differences between how these search engines operate and the results obtained from Plagium:

• Google and the other search engines limit the number of terms that you can enter into the query, typically on the order of 10 to a few dozen terms. However, Plagium can accept much larger blocks of text. Therefore, all of your content is evaluated, not just the words at the beginning of your document.
• Plagium makes use of a proprietary technique that intelligently breaks up the input text into smaller “snippets”. These snippets are matched against Web content in an efficient manner, with the matches scored to determine what documents match the input text. The result is a much cleaner view of possible matching documents – a view that is much less noisy than the results offered by the major search engines.

The answer is NO. Plagium only returns links to documents containing text blocks that match what you have presented to Plagium. Such results could imply unauthorized, copied use of your text but we cannot be the judge of that. Plagium cannot ascertain the authority or legitimacy of the documents that it retrieves. We strongly suggest that you seek legal counsel for the course of appropriate corrective action if you believe that somebody or an organization is using, without proper authorization, text that you created.

Deep Search enables the tracking of usage for large documents containing multiple paragraphs. When performing Deep Search, Plagium applies grammar and word usage rules to break the document’s paragraphs up into chunks of text which are then searched over the Web. Thus, an accurate paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of the text is carried out. The search results are then compiled to determine potential re-use of the overall document or parts of it. Plagium displays the analysis results paragraph-by-paragraph. In the left margin of the browser screen, we see the original text broken down by paragraph. Meanwhile, the right side of the browser screen displays the retrieved documents and Web pages that correspond to each paragraph of the original document. By mousing over any part of a retrieved web link or text, the corresponding original text will be highlighted.

Yes and No. Usage search for simple text up to 1,000 characters remains free of charge. Any larger text requires that credits for Plagium use be purchased. All Deep Search will also require the purchase of pre-paid credits.

Please understand that our method of operation is not that of the popular search engines, who have the ability to instantly match search terms to the indices of documents stored in their databases. To ensure a thorough, noise-free search, we must examine the entire amount of text that you present, which can thousands of characters long (not the usual one to 5 search terms submitted to the search engines).

No. we are determined to protect and maintain your privacy. Your personal information and your documents are not shared with any third party.

No, we are not at present a registry for text. Please seek legal counsel on how to formally register your text under applicable copyright laws in your state or country.

You can cancel your account here.