Earning your trust through transparency

Credibility score

One of the best ways to determine whether to trust an article is by checking its credibility. Using our CRAAP score, which automates scoring an article on credibility and completeness, you can easily achieve this.

Introduced in our first blog, you can easily score an article using the CRAAP score card yourself, we simply automate this for you. In our extension we show you how we got our results, making it very easy to check for yourself.

Sourcing articles

When it comes to what articles our extension works on, or what related articles our extension shows you, it is good to know where these articles come from.

All compatible publishers are selected by looking at what websites garner the most traffic, i.e. most people visiting the website. These publishers often also publish the most articles, and are most consistent in their structure, making it more reliable for usage with our extension.

As you may have noticed when using the extension, related articles are not necessarily from compatible publishers. To show you more relevant related articles, we also look for topics related to the article on popular search engines. We analyze the articles that pop up on top so you receive more relevant results.

Author information

Who is behind the article you just read? What makes them the right person to write about a news story? In our extension you can see some more information about the author, like their location, Twitter handle, and Twitter description.

We show the location as this may be relevant to the topic. Knowing where the author comes from or resides in contextualizes their stance relevant to the news story. This way you can better understand where the author may be coming from, or why are the person writing about it.

We also show their Twitter information, as we found that journalists are most active on Twitter outside of their publishers website. Thus finding them on Twitter is made fairly easy for us, and very useful for you. With the Twitter description you can easily verify their occupation and field of specialization, like journalist in 'Technology', or 'Epidemic Cases'.

Generating summaries

The point of summaries is not to replace the effort of having to read the article itself. Instead it can serve as a filtering tool for you to decide what to read, as well as it being a better alternative to skimming an article.

We create summaries very similar to solutions like SMMRY. We rank sentences based on the importance and frequency of the words used. Then we look at which sentences best describe the article given our ranking criteria and look for those that best cover the article as a whole.

Including some extra filtering and preparations steps to clean the sentences of unnecessary words, the result is a summary that compresses the article in a few sentences. It is good to know here that all summaries consist of sentences aforementioned in the article, and no new sentences are created for the summary.

User- and personal data

The anonymity and digital safety of our users is very important to us. We have made sure that we use as little user data as possible. Data that we do track is to improve the product, provide insights back to you, and never to track you personally but to get insight on news article performance.

Users are completely anonimized, as we use a random token generated on first use to match with your extension. But we only store the token and it is not possible for us to trace it back to you. Using this token we track some usage data, like what articles are read and what related articles are clicked-through to. More on usage of user- and personal data can be found in our second blog about our database.