The major search engines of the Web do a good job of identifying duplicate content, but that does not mean duplicate content and duplicate Web pages should be worry free. Common sense and general views is that duplicate content and duplicate Web pages can affect the performance of Web pages within search engine results and affect their overall ranking.
Speaking from hard-earned experience every webmaster and Web publisher should consider and investigate seriously their Web sites to make sure duplicate content and duplicate Web pages are exempt from the clever eyes of the powerful search engine spiders and indexers.
We recently covered duplicate content issues to consider and fortunately, there are specialized tools, some free, available to help webmasters to identify duplicate content and duplicate Web pages. Some webmasters with extensive programming skills can write customized code that takes care of these things, but there are probably more that rely on specialized tools.