New pages and files get added every day to the web. It is impossible to have every file or page on the internet saved in our database instantly. Therefore, a source you found online might not be in our database yet simply because it has not been scanned by our web crawlers.
Want to suggest a missing source?
When in doubt, feel free to provide Turnitin technical support with the URL of the source site by raising a Support ticket, and we can try to add it to the database.
Limitations with crawling and database matching
While we constantly update our index, certain types of web content cannot be scanned or added automatically due to technical restrictions or access barriers:
Subscription, login, or crawler restrictions
For databases where a subscription or login is needed for access (such as journals, magazines, and newspapers), or where our web crawlers are blocked, we cannot download the information automatically.
It is entirely up to the owners of those specific sites whether they grant permission for Turnitin to add a copy of their content to our database.
Examples of blocked sites: Well-known platforms like Quora.com and StuDocu.com explicitly block our web crawlers from indexing their pages.
Scanned documents and non-selectable text
Some online sources are images of text rather than actual machine-readable text (which is often the case with platforms like Google Books).
In these situations, Turnitin cannot capture the source content on the page, meaning we are unable to add it to our database for Similarity matching.
Media formats and spoken word
Turnitin is designed to index written text found across documents and web pages.
As a result, we are currently unable to check if a student's text has been transcribed directly from a video (such as YouTube), audio recordings, or any other non-text media sources.