Abstract

The spread of online misinformation has made fake news detection an essential tool for mitigating its negative impact, but many studies often disregard the temporal information, and existing datasets become outdated as news evolve. Some modern solutions using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can solve the problem of unseen news events by providing context to the models. However, there are no studies evaluating the feasibility of web searches to attain context to decide whether a news article is true or not. This work aims to address this gap by conducting a comparative study between RAG-based solutions, traditional fake news classification methods, and deep learning-based methods. The results show that although RAG is a modern and promising technique, it cannot outperform techniques already adopted in the literature.