Google Used To Catch Term Paper Cheaters
I knew this sort of thing happened, but I think I got to experience the catching personally:
Early this afternoon, I noticed that I got a referral from Google with the search term “The fanciful conceit is that Shakespeare is going through a severe case of writer’s block”. This phrase yields one real hit: a review I wrote for Shakespeare In Love about five years ago. If you put quotes around the search string, my review is the sole use of that phrase in the googleverse.
I did a lookup on the IP address of the person doing the Googling, and found that it came from Bucks County Intermediate School Unit, in Pennsylvania. My best theory is that a teacher was googling intereresting phrases off of some student’s paper as a rough plagiarism check, and the kid just got caught. Why else would you search for such a turn of phrase if you hadn’t seen it before?
I didn’t see search referrals over the past month for “shakespeare”, but there’s a few sources from which the kid could have come to my review without hitting my web site. It was originally posted to the Usenet group rec.art.movies.reviews, so a search of newsgroups would have been sufficient. Also, going to the IMDB page for the movie will give you a link to the Usenet reviews more directly. Mine is the next to last submitted for the film. What’s surprising is that this IMDB page isn’t indexed in Google.