The Compare plugin allows the user to judge the degree of difference between a number of responses. This is useful when you have issued a number of requests for a particular URL, possibly via the Scripted plugin, and would like to evaluate the results. Obviously, if you can eliminate groups of identical responses at once, you can save yourself some time.

Choose the "base" conversation against which others should be compared, using the drop down list. The Conversation table will be populated with conversations, and the Difference column will indicate the number of words that differ in the responses. The number is actually the Levenshtein Edit Distance, showing the number of edits (inserts, changes, and deletes) that are required to transform the base response into the current target. For speed reasons, the response content is tokenised into words, since the Levenshtein algorithm is O(n*m), and slows down quickly for large numbers of comparisons.

The two responses are then displayed side by side in the lower half of the window, to make it easy to compare them.