In our Keanu Reeves example, the absence of any news stories was telling. But many times when you use Google News (or other news search) you'll find something better: a fact-check on the claim.
Fact-checks are useful to web readers because they are designed to give a concise explanation of particular claims and because good fact checks (like good Wikipedia articles) show their work by linking to high quality sources that you can look at yourself.
Some times a search on a claim will turn up multiple stories, many of which are not relevant. Consider this bit of viral news that circulated on Facebook:
You know when you go to Walmart and they have the wipes to clean your cart handle? How many of you don’t use them? Well I do, and I always thought of the germs only. Was told today that the police chief also suggests you do it also because of all the problems with drugs now days, and if they have fentanyl or something like that still on their hands and they touch that cart handle and then you do, it can get into your system. Scary but worth taking the time to clean the handle. All you’d have to do is rub your nose or touch your child’s mouth.
Searching initially on just fentanyl shopping cart gives a mixed bag of results.
When we scan the blurbs we find that the first article — even though it is from a reputable source — contains the words fentanyl and shopping cart, but is not really about fentanyl on shopping carts. Likewise, the reference to shopping carts in the second one is to homelessness, not grocery store drug scares. It's the text of the third result that's in line with what we're researching, and that's the one we want to click. (Though once getting there we may want to use our source investigation techniques on Forbes).
This brings us to the move that often gets forgotten by students: the "S" in SIFT for "stop." As seen above, one aspect of "stopping" is to stop before you reflexively click the top search result. You want to take a second or two to make sure you're clicking the best result, not just the first one you see.
Another aspect of stopping is occasionally reformulating a search. We do see one fact-check in the above results, but perhaps we're surprised we don't see more. Maybe we start reading the Forbes story but find it unclear. If the results are not what we want we can modify the search query, here by adding "fact-check".