The 4FO AG offers the Firefox add-on FireMatcher (Beta) for download. FireMatcher analyzes local documents and finds similar documents in the Web.

FireMatcher is an extension for Firefox 3.x that offers a new approach to search for similar documents. Starting point for this new way to search are local documents which not even need to be made public. Teachers easily find the original documents of their students' work. Developers and researchers find out if similar things to their unpublished documents already exist. The same opportunities have journalists and other professions who want to know whether their unpublished document or a similar one is already public.

Using FireMatcher is very easy! Simply select documents from your desktop or contents from web pages. FireMatcher will analyze them instantly and extract their most important terms and phrases to present you topically matching documents in the web. This works for the formats .txt, .html, .pdf, .doc and .ppt.
FireMatcher is based on the search technology from the research project NIMS (Pro Inno II, BMWi). 4FO has modified the text technology (completely written in Java) from the University of Leipzig (Department ASV, Prof. Heyer) for the FireMatcher engine.

If you have already installed Firefox (3.x) and the new Java 6 you can download the Firefox extension (25MBytes) from www.FireMatcher.com.