My Grandparents: Scam Detectives

So my grandparents, in their 80s, got a computer recently and I made the mistake of giving them my email address. To them, computers are a brave new terrifying world, and they are suddenly the police of the Internet, forwarding me every email they get about every scam, trick and swindle that lands in their inbox.

Only thing is, most of the emails they're getting are either not really a problem, or they were a huge problem...back in 2002 when the emails first went around. I'm not sure what kind of scam historian keeps pushing these things out to octogenarians, but I hope they cool it soon. My first thought is to say "Grandpa, before you forward me the email, do a search on Snopes to see if it's really a problem," but I'm worried that his head would explode.

That's when I thought of Grammarly - since I've still got my account going. I wondered if they'd be able to use it to calm themselves and stop hyperventilating (I just assume they're doing that) every time someone sends an email about the Melissa virus or whatever.

So, I took the most recent email they sent me, with the subject of "Computer virus going around!!!" Here's a snippet:

HUGE VIRUS COMING ! PLEASE READ & FORWARD!

Hi All,

I checked with Norton Anti-Virus, and they are gearing up for this virus! I checked Snopes, and it is for real. Get this E-mail message sent around to all your contacts ASAP. PLEASE FORWARD THIS WARNING AMONG YOUR FRIENDS, FAMILY AND CONTACTS!

You should be alert during the next few days. Do not open any message with an attachment entitled 'POSTCARD FROM HALLMARK, 'regardless of who sent it to you. It is a virus which opens A POSTCARD IMAGE, which 'burns' the whole hard disc C drive of your computer.

The thing is, I remember this Postcard virus, and it's totally real - but it was a big deal back in '07, and started circulating as this type of email in '08. My grandparents sent it to me in 2010, bless their hearts. I plugged the above text into Grammarly's tool to see what the plagiarism detector would bring back.

First Result (from Joe Levi): A calm blog post announcing that this email is a hoax and telling people not to freak out.

Second Result (from Truth or Fiction): A Snopes-like site, also warning that this virus is no longer a big concern.

Third Result (from Yahoo! Answers): The OP asks, the answers are all validation that they shouldn't worry.

So it turns out Grammarly could be a useful tool for helping my grandparents separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to email scam alerts. Something to have in the hip pocket if they continue to send me stuff like that. Now if I can just get them to stop forwarding me Powerpoint presentations about birds from my crazy great aunt, I'll be all set.

Grammarly as a Scam & Plagiarism Detector

Earlier I posted wondering if Grammarly could be a viable plagiarism and scam detection alternative to my old favorite Copyscape, I decided to bite the bullet and try it out. I signed up for the seven-day free trial, partially because curiosity was getting my cat, and partially because I do get a little bit sick of the signal to noise ratio with Copyscape's free tool.

The first thing I noted when I started my free trial was that my suspicions from last week were right - you can't just enter a URL into the system and have it bring back a bunch of comparisons. You actually have to plug the text into their editor, which means one more step in terms of copying and pasting. Not a big deal, just something I noticed. My method for the test was to use a random story from CNN, which I knew would have all kinds of similarities across the Internet, to see what each system brought back.

Like I said, it's all about intent. Copyscape is trying to find every single instance of that same copy shows up online, to see who's trying to scam you and steal your copy. Grammarly, on the other hand, is trying to identify the single source it thinks is most likely the original. My sample was from CNN and neither tool seemed to quite get there in terms of finding my real source, and I have to say each result had its flaws.

Copyscape showed me every single retweet and legit use of that copy, while Grammarly just showed me a page that it hoped was the original. Neither one is quite giving me what I want when I'm looking for duplicate content and spammers, and all things considered I'm going to stick with the free tool.

Copyscape vs Grammarly: Scam & Plagiarism Detection Comparison

I have decided to focus this first blog post on the perennial SEO favorite topic, duplicate content. It's not as big a deal these days as it once was from an SEO standpoint, but spammers and scammers aren't shy about stealing good content and repurposing it for their own ends, which makes it valuable to be able to suss it out. That's why I'm doing the Copyscape vs Grammarly scam detector challenge.

Before the advent of tools like Copyscape and the Grammarly scam & plagiarism detector, the process of finding dupes was was pretty manual - I remember hours spent plugging pieces of content (inside double quotes of course) into Google's search box to see what domains would show up for the search. Nowadays there are multiple options for identifying this content and trying to catch the spam websites hosting it.

The tool I've always used is Copyscape, which offers both free and paid tools, and allows you to plug a URL into its website to identify any copies of the URL online. This can have multiple uses - entering one of my own (or more likely a client's) URL to see if anyone's riding on the coattails of the good copy we've created is the big one. You can also put in the URLs of competitors to see if they're trying to run a scam on search engines by offering the same content on multiple domains. Pretty basic stuff, but I've been working on Spam detection for a client so it's top of mind for me.

I was recently introduced to another tool I wasn't familiar - Grammarly - a spelling and grammar checking tool a friend of mine uses. Grammarly is paid-only (after a seven day free trial), but when my friend mentioned the service's plagiarism detection services my ears perked up. So which service makes the most sense when you're trying to detect duplicate content?

For my money (or more to the point, lack of wanting to spend it) Copyscape is still the best option. Not only do they always offer a free option (you can upgrade to paid for some added services, but nothing necessary for my purposes), and I couldn't find any indication that Grammarly would let me input a URL to find the scammy copy - it seems to work based on inputting text instead of a URL.

I'm interested in the idea of this hack of Grammarly's plagiarism detection to find spam, but i'm wondering if it's worthwhile unless I'm signing up to take advantage of the site's other services. At this point I'm inclined to stick with what works. That said, it seems worth it to sign up for Grammarly just to see if my hopes about souped-up plagiarism detection are true. I'll keep you all posted.