THE WEB | Need text? Just pinch it off the web. The only catch? Google will expose you. Ahmad Humeid goes after the copycats

A while ago there was a story in the news about a woman in the US who discovered that a man she was going out with was a wanted criminal by Googling his name. Never in the history of mankind has there been a tool that enables normal people to search through billions of pages of information. That’s why Google is now worth more than US$ 28 Billion (yes you read that right), and why Google founders Larry Page, 31, and Sergey Brin, 30, are now billionaires, at least on paper.

While I still haven’t found out that one of my friends is wanted by the police for serious crimes, I too was able to spot a criminal or two using Google. I call them the ‘text thieves’.

Take, for example, that fresh graduate who’s resume landed in my inbox the other day. For a change, here was a young man who took the time to write a nice covering letter for his resume. But there was something fishy. The letter sounded a bit too professional, with an introduction that seemed to come out from a consultant’s report. “Let’s see,” I said to myself while I copied and pasted the suspicious sentences from the guy’s resume and copied into Google. Boom. There it was. The exact same paragraph of text on another guys CV.

OK so let’s not to be too hard on our poor Jordanian youth (our hope for the cut-and-paste future). How about our ‘innovative’ private sector? Surely no self-respecting company would simply pinch the text of another company’s web site. Well, don’t bet on it! A few years back I was browsing the site of a now defunct Jordanian web design company. I was reading the profile of one of the company’s managers when I noticed something strange. A name was being mentioned in the profile that was different from the name of the manager? A Google search revealed that this company not only stole the personal profile text of a manager of a US-based company, but that this supposedly ‘creative’ company was also too lazy to proof read their stolen goods and change the name of the man in the text. These text thieves also stole themselves a company profile and full service descriptions. How convenient, huh?

My text thieves hunting missions sometimes reveal that more than one company in different countries have stolen the text of some bigger company in their field. I mean, who needs text writers these days. Nobody reads anyway. So just copy and paste and take the rest of the day off.

Plagiarism is a problem as old as history. But Google gives us hope that the copycats can sometimes be caught.