Plagiarism 2.1
Last summer, Jeff Jarvis turned up a content scraper that was copying his material, but not quite:
I just saw a splog that copied text of mine but ran it through ridiculous almost-synonym replacements. I’m assuming this is done to fool Google into thinking it is original content and perhaps to fool the text cops folks like the AP hire.
I hadn’t seen any recurrences of this phenomenon until this past weekend, when I caught two of them, both on Windows Live, one of them actually linking back to me.
Jarvis’ original link being 404ed for the moment, here are the items in question:
Note that in the latter splog, the original graphics are also swiped.
You can probably duplicate this sort of non-work yourself, by taking an article, feeding it to a translation site, then pasting the translation back into the box and converting it to yet another language, then pasting that translation back into the box and converting it to English.
Probably you can not duplicate this kind of work themselves, and taking an article from a site of translation, then paste the translation into the box and converts it into another language, then paste the translation into the box and converting it into English. (Same paragraph, run through Google Translate to Dutch, then to Italian, then back to English.)
fillyjonk »
24 November 2009 · 8:21 am
And you know? If a student did that with a website to plagiarize it to a paper they were supposed to hand in, it might be hard to tell. (Stilted syntax and odd word-usages can be par for the course with some)
Well, until the random German or Italian word showed up in their paper and you knew they didn’t speak the language…
Lisa Paul »
24 November 2009 · 11:56 am
What am I not getting about this? What is the goal of content scraping? Every time I’ve tracked down a site that has scraped my content, they don’t seem to have any ads other than Google Adsense. And we all know how little those pay. So it can’t be for the money.
Or is this the first wave of the machines taking over? Where is Sarah Connor?
Cary »
24 November 2009 · 3:14 pm
I have people steal stuff from me all the time.
I guess you just get used to it.
CGHill »
24 November 2009 · 3:28 pm
My best guess — keep in mind, best guesses and $5.99 will get you a combo meal at participating locations for a limited time only — is that they’re trying to build up a network of what looks like legitimate bloggery, in anticipation of bombarding the rest of us with comment and/or trackback spam.
Cary »
24 November 2009 · 3:47 pm
There’s legitimate and illegitimate bloggery?
Are you kidding?
CGHill »
24 November 2009 · 6:33 pm
Of course there’s illegitimate bloggery. Every time I see one of their pages, I think, “You bastard.”
Charles Pergiel »
24 November 2009 · 8:06 pm
Illegitimate bloggery! Oh, that’s funny! So sploggery has one beneficial side effect, it gave me a chuckle.
Donna B. »
24 November 2009 · 9:23 pm
You know what irritates me? I don’t think my site has ever been ’scraped’ for and I’m insulted. If original banality isn’t good enough, what is?
CGHill »
24 November 2009 · 9:32 pm
Two months from now, run a search for “talking cell-phone battery” and see who comes up.
Donna B. »
24 November 2009 · 11:02 pm
yeah, that story is strange… and though even I make fun of it, it’s true, every single bit of it!
I’m really hoping for more hits off neuro-urology though… it’s not as if the dirty jokes write themselves, they’ve been written for years!
CGHill »
25 November 2009 · 7:03 am
After a while, you reach critical mass, or something; if I never posted another item I’d probably still get 200-300 hits a day just from searchers.
soubriquet »
27 November 2009 · 4:46 pm
I was interested to read this, not knowing what a splog was, then finding I’d been targeted by them.
Bastards.
so I read further through the links, and found this re-translational gem:
” A Catholic mother in Britain who is unable to care for her boy holds objected to him being positioned in the surrogate attention of a homosexual duet. She holds shown concern the twosome could promote him into a path she makes not concord with, amid studies the boy is already enquire about homoeroticism.”
what?