SourceTrace
Photograph a page from a book, magazine or newspaper. SourceTrace pulls out the factual claims and goes looking for the sources behind them — including the ones that disagree.
How it works
- Photograph the page. Or share highlighted text to the app from anywhere on your phone.
- The claims come out first. Each factual statement on the page, and whether the author cited anything for it.
- Then the sources arrive, claim by claim. Real search results — never invented — scored for how directly they bear on the claim, and for whether they agree with it.
One real analysis
A page of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, exactly as the app returned it — two of its 8 claims, shown the way you would see them.
By the first century AD, only 1–2 million foragers remained, mainly in Australia, America and Africa.
By the first century AD, only 1–2 million foragers remained, mainly in Australia, America and Africa.
“in the past few hundred years, only an estimated 5 million people have subsisted by foraging”
The claim says 1–2 million foragers remained by the first century AD; this source says 5 million people subsisted by foraging in the past few hundred years, suggesting a higher figure and a different timeframe.
As recently as AD 1500, HGs occupied fully one third of the globe, including all of Australia and most of North America, as well as large tracts of South America, Africa, and Northeast Asia.
Farming enabled populations to increase so radically and rapidly that no complex agricultural society could ever again sustain itself if it returned to hunting and gathering.
vastly greater scale, agriculture allowed societies to get hugely bigger than ever · before. We can only guess at the absolute figures, but in areas where farming has · replaced foraging in modern times, population has increased fifty- or even a hun-
Source directly supports the claim that farming enabled radical population increases far beyond what hunting and gathering could sustain.
However, when the stars were in alignment – weather favourable, pests subdued, soils still packed with nutrients – agriculture was very much more productive than hunting and gathering. This enabled farming populations to grow far more rapidly than hunter-gatherers, and sustain these growing populations over much less land.
Agriculture did eventually trigger population growth, but through an unexpected mechanism. Cereal grains like wheat and rice could be processed into soft foods, allowing earlier weaning of infants.
What the verdicts mean
A verdict describes the evidence the app found, not whether the claim is true. “Contradicted” means relevant, independent sources dispute it — which is a reason to go read them, not a ruling. The app never writes a source: every link is a real search result, and every quoted line is checked word-for-word against the page it came from.