New internet pages and files get added every day to the web. It’s impossible to have every file or page on the internet saved in our database instantly. Therefore, a source you may have found online may not yet be in our database because it simply has not been scanned by our web crawlers yet.
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 adding it to the database.
In cases of databases where subscription or login are necessary for access (such as journals, magazines, newspapers, etc.), or where our web crawlers are blocked, we will not be able to download the information automatically. It will be at the discretion of those who control the particular site whether permission is granted and whether we are allowed to add a copy to our database. Examples of websites that block our crawlers are Quora.com and StuDocu.com.
Please note that some sources are images of text, and not actual text (such as with Google Books). In these situations, Turnitin will not be able to capture the source, and therefore cannot add it to our database. Additionally, Turnitin is unable to check if text has been transcribed from a video (e.g., YouTube), audio, or other non-text sources.