Randy Cassingham's Blog

Premium subscriber Edward in Arkansas asks, "Have you ever been hoaxed? I know you only use 'mainstream, legitimate newspapers' as sources (as you've said from time to time), but you can't possibly know all the newspapers in the world. How do you evaluate a new online source so that you're comfortably sure when you see a story that 'this is true'?"

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Good questions, Edward. I can't think of a time that I was hoaxed, but it wouldn't shock me if there were a few that got by in the past 14 and a half years. My number one tool in detecting "not true" stories is my own finely tuned BS-o-Meter -- I'm pretty darned good at saying "I don't THINK so!" And sometimes that has happened even with "legitimate, mainstream newspapers"; they're hoaxed more often than they'd like to think. One of my favorites that I didn't fall for is covered here.

But indeed I do have a very useful tool to help me evaluate a site. First, I use Firefox as a browser, rather than Internet Explorer, in part because it's more secure, but also because there are "plug-in" extensions that I find useful. One of the best is SearchStatus.

What this add-on does is put a status message at the top or (on mine) the bottom of the browser showing the Google "page rank" and Alexa rank of the page and site, respectively, you're viewing. Google's PR is a bit of a mystery, and is supposedly not really kept up-to-date, but if a site's home page has a PR that's greater than, say, 2-4, you can bet it's been around for at least a little while and has established some level of credibility. The Alexa ranking is a bit stilted toward techie users, but shows Alexa's rank of the site (not page) you're on.

For example, True's home page shows as a PR 6, and an Alexa rank in the 88-thousand range. Theoretically, that means Google is rating it pretty high as far as trust and "relevance", and Alexa ranks the site as the 88,625th (as of this writing) most popular web site in the world. Here's what it looks like at the foot of my browser:

So if I go to a newspaper site that has numbers like that, it's likely I can trust it. But if it's a PR 0 site with an Alexa ranking of 2 million, I'll either move on immediately, or look into it more carefully, like checking the "Whois" record to see who owns it, and how long it's been registered. I use DomainTools for my "Whois" lookups -- and SearchStatus has an interface to them built right in; I just click on the SearchStatus window, choose "Show Whois", and a new tab opens and shows me who owns that site. All in one tool: it's brilliant.

People get fooled all the time, thinking if a site is online and "looks" to be "professional", it's trustworthy. Not necessarily! A tool like SearchStatus gives you some objective information to help separate the useful from the useless.