"The Right Search” is a new kind of search engine, not powered by algorithms coming from Silicon Valley, but by humans.

To sort fact from fiction before the 2017 presidential election in France, Liberation, one of the best-known newspapers in the country, decided to replace the quantity and speed of search engines, by the quality and rigor of journalists to answer voters' questions.

So to help French people find the real facts, they could ask questions on checknews.fr, and journalists investigated their queries before coming back to them a few hours later with answers, backed up by real, not alternative, facts.

Making checknews.fr probably the slowest search engine on earth. But also the most reliable. 1 answer in 2.4 days... and it's not a lag!

We have decided to launch checknews.fr when, as expected, fake news were published massively the days preceding the TV debate opposing M. Macron to Ms. Le Pen. The debate was followed by 14 Millions viewers and discussed online. We have hacked discussions around the debate targeting any French voter (47 million voters aged 18+ listed) and invited them to ask their questions on checknews.fr to check if the facts shared by candidates were fake or not.

The campaign and website were launched on the 29th of April. The second round debate took place on the 3rd of May. Liberation promoted the operation via its social networks (Twitter and Facebook) and homepage through banners.

#CheckNews became the most trending term on French social media to signal lies and approximations.

Liberation has decided to turn the Check News campaign into a permanent tool against fake news.

872 topics were covered and fact-checked by journalists at Libération, with an average of 2 hours and 30 minutes delivery.

When we want to check an information, we all tend to google the question, as we also tend to believe the algorithm can deliver the right answer. Considering the fact that one out of four links shared on social media during the presidential election is fake news, we have decided to help people distance themselves from fake news. We needed to reconcile them with true sources, reliable media and journalists. To make them realise that the quality of information is not about speed but checked facts. Checknews.fr the slowest search engine powered by journalists was born.

Libération is one of France’s biggest daily newspapers, it was the first to introduce a fact checking service in a newsroom.

For the French presidential election, Libération asked us to provide a digital campaign to reclaim the importance of fact-checked-based journalism. The purpose being to counter the proliferation of fake news on Internet a few days before the French election, where the French had to choose between a liberal and a populist.