Finding and Checking Information

A search engine looks for pages that contain the words you type (Grade 6, Searching well). So the best search uses the words that are on the page you want, not the words of your question.

Think about who wrote the page you hope to find, and how they would say it:

• Use the words an expert would use. You ask “why does my phone get hot when charging?”; a page that answers it probably says phone overheating while charging. You ask “when does the rain start?”; the weather office calls it the monsoon onset.
• Use the words from your first results. Skim the first page of results for better words, then search again with them. Searching is rarely one try: it is search, read, and search again with better words.
• Name the thing exactly. rhino finds rhinos everywhere; one-horned rhinoceros Chitwan count finds the counts.
• Try another language. Many things about Nepal are written only in Nepali. भूकम्प पूर्वानुमान (earthquake prediction) finds pages that earthquake prediction never will.
• Think about what kind of page you want. A definition? Add meaning or definition. Numbers? Add data, statistics or report. How to do something? Add how to or steps.

Once a page opens, don’t read it all to find one fact. Use Find in page: on a computer, press Ctrl + F and type a word; in a phone’s browser, it is in the menu (often ⋮ or the share button). The browser jumps to every place the word appears.

Search engines understand a few special signs and words, called search operators, that tell them exactly which pages you want. You already know two: quotation marks (Grade 6) and AND, OR and NOT Grade 7: Unit 4. Here are the ones worth knowing by heart:

Type this	It finds	Example
“quotation marks”	the words side by side, in that order	“load shedding schedule”
-word (a minus sign, no space)	pages without that word	mercury -planet finds the metal
site:	pages only from one website, or one kind of website	passport site:gov.np
filetype:	only files of one kind	monsoon report filetype:pdf
OR (in capitals)	pages with either word	momo OR dumpling

Two of these need a closer look.

site: keeps only the addresses that end the way you say. site:gov.np keeps only websites whose address ends in .gov.np, which only Nepal’s government can have; site:edu.np keeps Nepal’s schools and colleges. And site: with one website’s whole address searches just that website, which is often better than the website’s own search box.

filetype: keeps only one kind of file: pdf for documents and reports, xlsx for spreadsheets, pptx for slides. Official reports, notices and textbooks are very often PDFs.

You can join operators together. grade 7 science textbook site:gov.np filetype:pdf asks for all of these at once: those words, on a government website, in a PDF. No space goes between an operator and its word: site:gov.np, not site: gov.np.

A page of search results is not a list of true answers. A program put the pages in that order, by how well they seem to match your words, how many other pages link to them, how new they are, and many other things. High in the results doesn’t mean right. A popular wrong page can sit above a correct one.

So, before you tap:

1. Read before you click. Look down the whole first page of results, not only the top one. Professional fact-checkers do this; it is called click restraint. Then open the result most likely to know.
2. Look at the address of each result. Who is the website? A government office, a university, a newspaper, a shop, someone’s blog? Look out for addresses made to look like a famous one, with a letter changed or a word added.
3. Don’t trust the snippet alone. The few lines under a result are cut from the page and may leave out the part that matters.

Ads in disguise

In Grade 6 you learned that results marked Sponsored are ads. Many ads are harder to spot, because they are made to look like something else:

• a story on a news website marked, in small letters, Sponsored content, Partner content or Promoted: a company paid for it, and often wrote it, in the news website’s own look;
• a post or video marked Paid partnership, or a video whose maker says a company paid for it: an influencer (someone with many followers) praising a product they were paid to praise;
• a page of “the 10 best phones” that is paid a little for every phone bought through its links;
• a box of “stories you may like” at the bottom of a page, many of them ads.

None of this is a lie in itself. The question is always: who paid for this, and what do they want me to do?

Fact-checkers, researchers and good students all ask three questions about anything they find online:

1. Who is behind it?
2. What is the evidence?
3. What do other sources say?

These three are the heart of Civic Online Reasoning, a way of teaching students to judge what they find online, made by the same Stanford team that ran the study above. The first question sounds easy. In Grade 6 you looked at a page’s address and its About part, and that is a start. But most people stop there: they judge a website by what it shows about itself, its name, its logo, its About page, how professional it looks. That is the mistake.

Reading down (or vertical reading) means staying on a website and judging it by what it says about itself. Reading across, or lateral reading, means leaving the website to find out what other people say about it: in news reports, an encyclopedia, a list of registered companies, a review by experts.

Why does reading down fail? Because a website controls everything on its own pages. Anyone can call themselves a “council”, an “institute” or a “foundation”, put “independent experts” on their About page, buy a smart logo, and get an address ending in .org, which anyone can buy. Only what others say is out of their control.

How to read laterally:

1. Open a new tab and search for the website’s or the organization’s name. Add a word such as who runs, owner or funded by, or search in Nepali too.
2. Read what independent sources say: news reports, an encyclopedia, a government list. Who owns it? Who pays for it? Does it sell something linked to what it claims?
3. Do the same for the person who wrote it. Are they an expert in this? Do others in the field know them?
4. Then decide, and only then read the page itself carefully, if it is worth it.

This usually takes a minute or two, not an hour.

A fact online is usually not where it began. Someone says it in a report; a news website retells it; a social media page retells the news; a forwarded message retells the page. Like the game where a whisper is passed round a circle, it changes at every step: a number grows, “some” becomes “most”, “may” becomes “will”, the place or the date disappears.

So, to check a claim, go upstream: find the original source, the first place it was said, by the people who found it out. A retelling may be right, but only the original shows what was really said, and the evidence for it.

How to go upstream:

• Follow the links. A good article links to its source. Follow it, and the next one, until you reach the people who measured, counted or saw it.
• Search a sentence in quotation marks. A post with no link can often be traced by searching a sentence or a number from it, in quotation marks: you find the older pages that said it first.
• Search for the study. “Scientists say” or “a study shows” is not a source. Which scientists? Which study? Search for it, by its subject, the people or the place.
• Check the date. Is the original from this year, or ten years ago, shared again as if it were new?

People believe what they see, which is why pictures are used to fool them. Most fake pictures online are not edited at all. They are real photos with a false story: a real photo from another place or another year, shared with a new caption. This is called a photo out of context: taken away from the place, the time and the story it really belongs to.

Reverse image search

You can search with a picture instead of words. A reverse image search finds where else the same picture (or one very like it) appears online. Look for the oldest copy: if a photo said to be “today” was online three years ago, the story is false. The oldest copies, often from the photographer or a news agency, usually say where and when it was taken.

To search with a picture:

1. Save the picture, or take a screenshot of it.
2. Open a reverse image search (see the box below) and give it the picture.
3. Look through the results for pages with the same photo, and find the oldest. Read what they say it shows.

For a video, take a screenshot of one clear moment and search with that.

Look in the picture itself for clues, too: the writing on signs and shops (which language? which script?), the number plates, which side of the road the traffic drives on, the weather and the season, the clothes. A photo said to be from Kathmandu with signs in Spanish has a problem.

Pictures that never happened

Some pictures are changed: things cut out, added or moved with an editing app. And today, AI programs can make a photo-like picture of anything, from a few typed words: a flood that never happened, a famous person somewhere they never were. Grade 8 looks at how AI makes pictures.

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia on the web, written by volunteers. It began in English on 15 January 2001, and in Nepali on 3 June 2002. Anyone can edit almost any article, even without an account. So how can it be any good?

Because it has rules, and many people keeping them:

• Every fact must be verifiable: it must come from a published, reliable source, which the article names. Wikipedia isn’t a place for anyone’s own new ideas.
• Articles must be neutral: they describe what reliable sources say, giving each side its fair weight, without taking sides.
• Thousands of volunteers, and programs called bots, watch the changes. Nonsense and vandalism are usually removed quickly.

So Wikipedia is often a very good place to start: to get an overview, learn the right words for a topic (useful for your next search), and find sources. It is not the place to end. The way to use it well is to look at the parts that show where its facts came from.

• The footnote numbers, like [1], after a sentence, lead to the References: the sources the facts came from. Open the reference and check that it really says what the article says.
• Citation needed marks a fact that nobody has given a source for yet. Treat it as unchecked.
• View history lists every change ever made to the article, by whom and when. A fact changed a few minutes ago may not have been checked by anyone.
• Talk is where editors discuss the article: what they disagree about, and which sources are good.
• A box at the top, such as “This article needs additional citations”, warns that the article has problems.

Much of the best information is not on ordinary web pages but in documents: reports, notices, laws, textbooks, usually as PDF files. And numbers come in data sets: tables of numbers collected by someone, often as spreadsheets.

To find them:

• Go to whoever made them. Government offices publish their reports, notices and data on their own websites: exam results on the exam board’s site, rainfall on the weather office’s site, the census on the statistics office’s site. Search for the office’s name, then use its website.
• Use the operators. site:gov.np and filetype:pdf or filetype:xlsx find documents and data quickly.
• Your textbooks are online. Nepal’s Curriculum Development Centre publishes the government’s textbooks for Grades 1 to 12 as free PDF files, in Nepali and English, with the teachers’ guides (see the box below).

Is the data any good?

Before you use a number, check three things:

Check	Ask	Example
Authentic	Who made it, and is this really their data, not a copy someone changed?	the census numbers on the statistics office’s own website
Accurate	How was it collected? How many were measured? Could it be wrong?	a survey of 30 students tells you less than one of 3,000
Timely	When is it from? Is there a newer one?	a population from 2011, when the 2021 census exists

Even the original source can change its numbers. The first results of Nepal’s 2021 census, published early, counted 29,192,480 people. The final report, published in March 2023 after every form was checked, gave 29,164,578. Pages that copied the first number are not lying, but they are out of date. Always look for the newest version, from the people who collected it.

When you use a fact, a number, a sentence or an idea that you found, you say where it came from. This is called citing the source, and the note you write is a citation. In Grade 6 you gave credit for pictures (Grade 6, Giving credit the right way); the same goes for every fact you didn’t find out yourself.

Why cite?

• It is honest. Your reader knows which ideas are yours and which you found. Passing off others’ words as yours is plagiarism (Grade 6).
• Your reader can check. If your number looks surprising, they can open the source and see.
• It makes your work stronger. “Nepal had 29,164,578 people in 2021, according to the census” is far more convincing than “Nepal has about 29 million people, I think.”

A simple citation for something online has five parts:

1. Who made it: a person, or an organization.
2. When it was made or published (often just the year).
3. The title: of the report, the article or the page.
4. Where to find it: the website’s address, or the page’s full address.
5. When you looked at it: pages online change, and the reader may find something different later.

At the end of a project, list your citations under Sources. In Grade 9 you will write a reference list in a set style, as reports and universities do.

Quoting and using your own words

When you copy someone’s exact words, put them in quotation marks and cite the source: The census report says that Nepal’s population grew by “0.92 percent” a year. When you explain an idea in your own words, you still cite it, because the idea is theirs. Don’t copy a paragraph and change a few words: that is still copying. Read, close the page, then write what you understood.

Keep notes as you go

Researchers keep notes while they search, so that they never lose a source. For each useful thing you find, write: the fact or idea in your own words, the citation, and how far you trust it, and why. A notebook works; so does a document or a spreadsheet, with a column for each. Then writing your project, and its list of sources, is easy.