17 Has it Already Been Fact-Checked?

Constructing a Query to Find Previous Fact-Checking

Check for previous fact-checking by searching known and trusted fact-checking sites for a phrase or keyword from the story. Use the “site” function in search engines such as Google and DuckDuckGo .

Site Search.  The Site Search function allows you to search a specific domain(s) for a search term instead of the entire internet.

In this example, we used the DuckDuckGo search engine. For our query, we use Snopes (a well-known fact-checking site) as well as keywords from the story in the following syntax:

oklahoma police ERAD site:snopes.com

Here are the results of our search:

The results show that work has already been done in this area. In fact, the first result from Snopes answers our question almost fully. Remember to follow search engine best practice – scan the results and click on the best result in the result list. There are similar syntaxes you can use in Google, but for various reasons this particular search is easier in DuckDuckGo.

Let’s look at another claim, this time from Good Jobs First. This claim is that Oklahoma teachers are the worst paid in the country. Here it is in context:

Let’s check this out using another well known fact-checking site (politifact.com):

good jobs first oklahoma teachers site:politifact.com

This gives us back a helpful array of results. The first article (the first two results are advertisements only) actually answers our question, but some of the others provide some helpful context as well.

Politifact confirms that this claim is mostly true (completely true for the average salary of private school teachers and tax breaks for energy companies, but Oklahoma is third from the bottom in public school teacher pay). We do not need to search any further.