PlagScan

» see plagscan.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

PlagScan's rule was three words. The two-stage matcher behind it was written in 2008 and it flagged a passage once three consecutive words turned up in another source, then threw the flag away again if the hit was isolated or properly quoted. What came back was a report with the suspect passages marked and a list of everywhere else they appeared. You could run it in a browser or inside a learning management system like Moodle, and an administrator could carve an institution into departments with their own sub-administrators, which is the feature that decides whether a university buys software like this.

The company, PlagScan GmbH, was founded in Cologne in 2009 by Markus Goldbach and Johannes Knabe. Most of its customers sat in Germany and Austria. The University of Zürich and Auburn University were both on the list, as was the United Nations Development Programme, and in Austria the software reached school level: every pre-scientific paper written by an Austrian secondary school pupil ended up being checked with it.

By 2018 the numbers were more than 1.5 million individual users and over 1,500 organizations, with several million documents run through it a year. For a two-founder company from Cologne selling into a market where the incumbent was American and much larger, that is a long way up.

~ the record ~

~ the guttenberg effect ~

Germany got interested in plagiarism detection all at once. In 2011 the defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, resigned after his doctoral dissertation was found to be substantially copied, and the scandal ran for months in a culture that takes the title of Doktor more seriously than most. WirtschaftsWoche ran a piece that September on the young entrepreneur who was successfully hunting plagiarism, and German Wikipedia records the magazine's observation plainly: PlagScan got a considerable lift out of the Guttenberg affair.

The product had an obvious hole in it and the German article names it: PlagScan was not connected to Google Book Search, so a thesis copied out of a book that had been scanned but not put on the open web could walk through. The pitch that worked anyway was jurisdictional. PlagScan put its compliance with German data protection law at the front of everything, promising institutions that their documents stayed under their own control, and that was a far shorter conversation with a European university than the alternative.

~ what turnitin bought ~

Then the consolidation came for it. Around 2019 and 2020 PlagScan merged with the Swedish checker Urkund, and the combined company took the name Ouriginal under the Nordic private equity firm Procuritas. On 15 March 2021 Turnitin, the incumbent PlagScan had spent a decade competing with, announced its intent to buy Ouriginal, describing it in its own press release as "a company formed from the union of Urkund and PlagScan" with a customer base in the German-speaking and Nordic markets that complemented its own. Australia's competition regulator looked at the deal and let it pass. The acquisition completed on 30 November 2021.

The wind-down took four more years and it went in order of who paid least. Individual users were cut first. The pricing page put up a goodbye in German saying single-user packages were no longer on sale, and anyone still holding credits had until 31 December 2024 to spend them, after which their accounts would not open. Organizations were allowed to run to the end of their licenses, 31 December 2025 at the outside. While all that was being announced, the footer of the site still read "Copyright PlagScan 2022."

~ 1 january 2026 ~

The domain is gone now. A lookup on plagscan.com comes back with nothing, while the www host redirects into turnitin.com, onto a page headed by one flat sentence: PlagScan service ended on January 1, 2026. Underneath it the page thanks you for your interest and recommends Turnitin Similarity, which it notes offers many of the same features.

I went through a Turkish university between 2003 and 2010, which was before any of this was routine where I was; nobody fed my coursework to a matcher, and if they had, the matcher would not have been this one. PlagScan belonged to the German-speaking academic world almost entirely, and it died ten months ago, among the freshest graves on this site. The thing that killed it is still selling the same product under a different name.

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