Plagiarism
How to Compare Two Web Pages?
Whether you’re a website developer, a content publisher, or a programmer, you’ll often find that you need to compare two web pages quickly.
Whether you’re a website developer, a content publisher, or a programmer, you’ll often find that you need to compare two web pages quickly. But who has the time to trawl through all of that code just to find those missing pieces that happen to be the same (or different?) Is there an easy way to compare two web pages and highlight the differences?
The answer is yes! You can easily compare two web pages and spot the differences highlighted in plain text or code – a major time-saver for developers, writers and publishers as well as those who want to protect their content from intellectual property theft.
Here’s how to do it, step-by-step as well as a free tool that makes it easy to compare two web pages.
There are lots of reasons why a web developer or content publisher might want to do a text comparison between two pages, including:
If you’re an educator, content creator or website administrator, being able to identify instances of plagiarism can help you keep your content safe and prevent duplicate content from penalizing you in the search engines. In addition, being able to accurately detect plagiarism can help maintain academic integrity and help keep you safe from the legal repercussions of copying someone else’s content without proper attribution.
For web developers who are tasked with updating a page, being able to compare old and new versions ensures that all of your updates have been completed and that you’re not mistakenly uploading an older version of the same page.
Being able to compare two web pages helps in quality assurance by highlighting any errors or differences that might have happened, for instance during an update or a content migration.
With so many content collaboration tools on the market and multiple people working together on articles, it can be helpful at times to see who added what to which version to make sure you’re working with the correct piece of content.
With different versions of the same code, programming and development can get muddy. Having version control repositories like GitHub can help you track and compare changes and updates to code over time while having a centralized place to store the different versions and avoid accidental overwrites.
Different systems have different methods, but generally speaking, a lot happens behind the scenes when comparing two web pages. Ideally the platform you choose will let you compare two URLs or two text documents side by side simply by copying and pasting the content you want to check. Once you begin the process, several things are happening in the background:
The first step is that the system creates unique “digital fingerprints” for various pieces of content that will be compared. In the computing world, these are called hash values. By comparing the hash values of two different web pages, a computer or software program can identify if there are differences between them.
The content is then broken down into individual words or sentences, called “tokens”. Just like with the “fingerprints”, they can look at the different sequences of tokens to see if there is anything that stands out in the comparison.
More advanced comparison tools take advantage of natural language processing (NLP) to compare the semantic meaning of content. This is particularly important when checking for plagiarism since someone could be using another person’s idea, but reframing it in their own words. This type of paraphrasing would fly under the radar of many simple plagiarism checkers, which is why more advanced scanning techniques, like NLP text matching, are used.
Originality.ai’s free text comparison tool lets you effortlessly compare two web pages while highlighting the differences (or similarities) between them. Originally intended as a way to check for plagiarism quickly and efficiently, you can do much more than that with this versatile tool, including:
Compare Two Different URLs - Concerned that another site is copying your content? Want to avoid the duplicate content penalties from Google? With Originality.ai’s text comparison tool, you can easily compare the content at two different URLs. Simply paste in the URLs, let the system find the resulting text, and then click the Compare Texts button to start the process. In seconds, it will highlight the differences.
Compare Text By Copying and Pasting - You can also optionally copy and paste in the text or code that you want to compare. The results will be highlighted as well as other points like number of words in the old versus new version, and keyword density.
Compare Code - Beyond plain text, you can also compare the differences between two different pieces of code. This can be useful for many different types of code including HTML, CSS, Javascript, metadata and more.
Compare Word Counts - In addition to checking for differences or similarities, Originality.ai’s tool also lets you compare word accounts between the original and new versions of text.
Compare Keyword Density - When trying to rank for specific keywords, being able to check and compare keyword density between two documents is invaluable. In addition to finding out the density of single keywords, our text comparison tool can also do double keywords (or keyphrases) to tell you which words or phrases are the most used on the page, and what the percentage is.
Whether you need to check for differences in code or prevent plagiarism by highlighting the similarities between two different pieces of content, Originality.ai’s free text comparison tool is an invaluable way to do a 1:1 comparison as well as check keyword and keyphrase density. Spot content that matches the original or prevent coding errors by highlighting the differences. Let computers do what they do best while you concentrate on the rest. Try it now for free!