Google Alerts is one of the lesser known services from Google. It has been operating from 2003, but not many are utilizing its potential. The alerts are beneficial to anyone wanting to be up to date about the topics that interest them. Harnessing Google’s capacity to crawl across the web and index sites, users will be one of the first to know about the latest happening around a topic. Whatever you are using Google repetitively for, Google alerts can do it automatically and send updates as it happens.
Google Alerts uses a keyword/topic to filter out the most recent news, blogs, and discussions from their crawlers. The filtered list or updates are then automatically sent as an Email, oran RSS feed to use with a feed reader application. Assume searching for your favorite topic or celebrity every day to hear about the related news, Google Alerts does this automatically every day and sends the updates in email. Skips the need for daily searches to be up to date about your favorite interest.
The other significant feature about Google Alerts is that users can use regular google-fu techniques to refine results. Users can use keywords between double quotes to make the results have the said keyword on their title. Use “site:bbc.com keyword” to only get news from a particular site. Set sources, language, and region from where Google Alert gathers the results. The flexibility allows users to customize and avoid results they are not interested in.
Google Alerts requires users to be logged in to save the alerts. So don’t go out sharing personal feed links, as it may be misused. So it may be easy the same gmail as the notification option. If you are familiar with RSS feed reader apps, you can get specific google alerts rss feed urls. You can add them to the feed reader or use it to do more awesome things like update twitter or facebook page encouraging engagement from fans with IFTTT.
If you are a student, researcher, marketer or even a businessman, you can utilize google alerts to get the news right where you want them anywhere internet is available. You can create as many alerts and then you will have your assistant sending recent updates as it happens. With the filters and a little of google-fu, Google Alerts helps you be updated about your interests every day from various sources without having to go through news websites.
