Google News is a good place to verify older claims as well, or claims where you are unsure of the relevant time-frame.

As an example, here’s an item that floated into my Pinterest feed today:

Is this true? Is it new?

If you go to Google, type in Katee Sackhoff, search then and hit the news tab, you’ll find out that it is at least true that Sackhoff *said* this in 2013:

You can actually scan enough snippets here to get an idea of what happened. Reliable sources say Sackhoff said she lost half her followers, less reliable sources such as WorldNetDaily and Guns.com validate the “half” claim directly in their headlines, without stating Sackhoff was the source of the claim and the claim was not verified.

This is why it’s still important to choose sources from the feed wisely, read the keyword-in-context snippets when available, and if necessary click through to the article.

In this particular case, the precision of words turns out to be important, since as Reason.com notes in an update to their erroneous story that Sackhoff appears to have been making a joke and did not lose many followers at all:

UPDATE: Looks like Sackhoff was kidding when she said she lost half her followers. Twitter stats show she didn’t take a net hit. She’s actually up a few followers today. A Sackhoff fan emails to say “Katee jokes a lot.”

(As a side note, one indicator of source reliability is whether they issue corrections after claims they made are discovered to be false. Seeing which outlets bothered to correct this story and which didn’t might make a good class activity.)