Here's an example of what a fact-checker might say:

ALEXA TOILET According to Wikipedia, Tom's Guide is a publication run by the people who run Tom's Hardware, a very old and well known product review site. You can find this in the Wikipedia article on Tom's Hardware in the Related Publications section, and if you want to be super sure, click the linked footnote that talks more about the site and confirms this is the right URL for it. It seems like a trusted source for this kind of news.

How did we find that out? We used the Just add Wikipedia trick:

We searched for the site (adding our bare keyword "wikipedia"), and found the most relevant Wikipedia page at the top of the results. It wasn't an exact match, but it was close enough to check it out.

Clicking through to the Wikipedia article Tom's Hardware, we searched (using either control or command-f) for the phrase Tom's Guide on the page, and found it in Related Publications.

This is probably enough to state it's a legitimate site for this sort of story, but if we wanted to be extra sure that the Tom's Guide mentioned here is tomsguide.com, there is a footnote on that part of the Wikipedia page, and if we follow it we find this:

Los Angeles - September 18, 2007 - TG Publishing LLC (www.tgpublishing.net) a Bestofmedia Group company, one of the top-three online media publishing companies for technology in the world, announced today the rebrand of Gear Digest to Tom's Guide (www.tomsguide.com). Tom's Guide is the definitive online resource for unbiased and trusted information on the latest consumer electronics and technology gear.

That's a press release from the group that runs Tom's Guide, so it might not be a great resource for some things, but for the purpose of confirming the URL is a match it's perfect. Less than sixty seconds of effort and we know this is a real site and likely a real story. Share the Alexa toilet story with anybody you desire.

Take a look at the answer in your notes. How did you do in your investigation? If you want to touch up your answer having read this, go ahead.

Although not shown in the animation, we used "control-f" to search for information on the web page. If you are familiar with control-f (command-f on a Mac) continue to the next page. But if not, read the articles below on using control-f on the web — we'll be using it a lot.

Next up: Wikipedia