Verification: Google Search
Master advanced search shortcuts to filter results by date, relevance and language.
Target your search using quotation marks.
As reports emerge of a breaking news event, the likelihood of finding eyewitness experiences on social media is high. Leveraging multiple sources to verify a story is always a good practice.
To improve your search skills, try grouping words together using quotation marks to find particular phrases. When searching social media, it’s a good idea to use phrases that eyewitnesses would use. So, instead of “airport evacuation,” try “we just evacuated” or “right outside my building”.
How to search for keywords in video titles.
Finding video footage of a newsworthy event can help to both report and verify a story.
Here’s a useful shortcut: combine site-specific searches of video sharing platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo or DailyMotion with keyword searches, using the command intitle.
- For example, in a story about a helicopter rescue, you might search for: [intitle:”helicopters circling” site:youtube.com]
Use Advanced Search to filter language and region.
Let’s say the story you’re working on is about a helicopter mountain rescue in Argentina. You can perform advanced searches for web pages, images or videos and filter them by region and/or language.
From your initial search results, click Settings in the upper right-hand corner and select Advanced Search.
Here you can input multiple keywords in the common language of the region you’re searching. If you need help with this task, type or paste the text into Google Translate for a recommendation.
For this example, you would translate “helicopter mountain rescue” into Spanish, type in helicóptero de rescate de montaña and select Argentina as the region.
