When you’re confronted with a news claim you want to verify, you have a lot of options. Generally, the first move of our four move method is to look for previous work. Find a fact-check or a reliable article from a local or well-resourced publication that’s already done the verification for you.

The easiest way to do that, especially with breaking news, is to use the select and search browser option. Select relevant text, right-click (or command-click) to get a context menu, and then select the “search” option.

When the search opens in a new tab, choose the news tab (available in both Google and Bing). This gives you a curated stream of news to choose from and provides some markers of credibility as well, showing you what a local source is and marking in-depth treatments. Here’s a screencast to show how it's done:

There are things to watch here. Google News provides a much higher quality set of news sources than general search, but not everything in Google News is trustworthy. Google News still indexes conspiracy sites such as World Net Daily, for instance. Additionally, when foreign newspapers report American stories (or when American papers report foreign stories) special care should be taken: cultural notions sometimes don’t transfer, and foreign press often misunderstand hoax sites as true American news, as in this case where an Indian newspaper repeats a hoax debunked by Snopes months ago:

Users also have to be careful of opinion columns on traditional news sites. There are many reliable reporting sources that have opinion pages with little to no verification process in place. Here’s an example of what to be careful of:

There’s two New York Times items here, but they are completely different in type, and for all intents and purposes from two different sources. The first one is an opinion column, and the second is a straight news item. In Google, they look exactly the same. If you’re used to this stuff, you can get a good idea from the tone of the snippet which is which, but if you’re new to this you probably have to click through.

A good traditional news source — such as the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post— will make clear which items are opinion and which are reporting. Many non-traditional sources will not (one benefit of using traditional sources for verification is the hard line they draw between editorial and news reporting).

All of these caveats might sound a bit distressing, but even with these caveats, using Google News to check news claims is going to filter out 95% of the junk. For many verification tasks it’s the best first move.