It’s surprising how even strings of a few words can be totally unique in Google’s huge indexes. The other trick is to use double quote marks: "I like to drink iced cold coffee" … just like that sentence. And Google will pull up pages with exactly that sentence (3 results). I generally run checks on pages as I update my content, just as a matter of course, that’s how I found your content.
The problem with Google is that they have been cleaning house: cleaning out articles and heavily penalizing sites with duplicated content (both original and copier) in the past 12 months, and the sites affected (including some of the biggest on the web) have lost tons of traffic (in some cases unto 70%), because of this duplicated content. Previously people didn’t mind too much as long as articles were attributed (with source/author) properly. This is no longer the case, esp. since Google is still the #1 search engine for most searches.
The challenge with the pages I pointed out are that snippets of text that are heavily copied will result in lower Google rankings, and if this persists across many pages, the sites on which these snippets are pasted will also suffer with a lower reputation, lower rankings, and ultimately less Google traffic.
So, having uniquely worded content that visitors enjoy reading and find valuable is the real trick to building traffic from the Internet, while the information that you impart may not be particularly unique, the way that you do that IS. Or at least, I try to achieve that.