In my work I am involved in implementing the use of anti-plagiarism software. Several faculties and universities I have spoken have decided to use different software for detecting plagiarism. They all claim to give you a good chance in spotting plagiarism so I thought I would give them a trial run. Please note: This is not a large scale test, this was just a once off test using a document I constructed myself.

The document contains public text, altered text, text on a restricted site and a translated text off a public website. The text is of course on Plagiarism.
» The original text

This is what three products provided as a response:
Urkund: no matches (even after removing the quotes)
Ephorus: two matches (match 1, match 2)
Safe Assignment: two matches

My greatest surprise was the fact that they all provided different links. They did not find the public text in a pdf document. However they did find the restricted text because somebody had been kind enough to quote it on a public site. Naturally they did not find the translated text. All in all I was quite surprised by the outcome of this quick and dirty test.