FW: WEE #2.09 - Google Alerts by email

POSTED BY on 1:37 pm under
 
THIS E-NEWSLETTER HAS SOME GREAT IDEAS ABOUT USING GOOGLE
IF U FIND THIS INTERESTING SIGN UP FOR HIS NEWSLETTER/S
 
 

Woody's EMAIL Essentials

Make electronic mail work better for you

Google Alerts
7 October 2004 - Vol. 2 No.9

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@ A nifty new email service

by Peter Deegan

Google keeps coming up with clever uses of their search technology and one of the recent arrivals is Google Alerts.  With Alerts you can setup favorite search terms and get an email when there are changes in the top pages returned from that search.

The service is currently in beta but is available to all comers, much in the same way that Google News has been in beta for the last three years.

To setup alerts go to www.google.com/alerts  – you have the option to ‘sign in’ and create an account. I suggest you do that because it is easier to manage your alerts later.

Each Alert is made up of three parts:

Search Term

Any search string you’d use in Google will work here. 

You may want to exclude a particular web site from your search – for example your own or company web site – and you can do that by using the –site:<domain> addition to a Google search.

Searching for a specific phrase needs double quote marks around it.  This is commonly used to look for word combinations instead of any page that has the words in any order.

Tip:  you can easily make complex Google searches by going to their Advanced Search Page , make up the search there and click ‘Google Search’.  The selections you’ve made are converted into a search string which you can copy into a Google Alert.  

TYPE

Each Alert can cover the entire web (just like a search from the main Google page) or just news services (same as a search from news.google.com) or both.

While you can combine the Web and News searches into one alert, I prefer to keep them separate so there are two alerts for the same search term with one for Web and the other for News. 

The alerts don’t tell you about every search result and when they change – in many cases that would mean extremely long emails.  Google Alerts tells you about changes in the top 20 results for the Web search or the top 10 results for the News search.

How often

This is how often you’ll get an Alert sent by email.  Your choices are ‘once a week’, ‘once a day’ or ‘as it happens’.

If you really want to get a lot of email then choose a popular search and choose ‘as it happens’. 

Chances are you’ll want to limit the frequency to Daily.  Each alert can have a different frequency so you can have some Daily and others Weekly.

Confirmation

Once you have created an alert you’ll receive an email message asking for confirmation of the alert.  Just click on the link and the Alert is established.

Changes and Deletion

Just go back to www.google.com/alerts to change, add or delete your alerts.

@ Whitelisting

To make sure you get your alerts, make sure that the domain google.com or the address googlealerts-noreply@google.com  is added to your white-list or safe senders list.

@ What is it good for?

As predicted by Sir Arthur C. Clarke many years ago in The Fountains of Paradise, the first alert for most people has to be their own name.  You can get an automatic email when the web or news has new and popular hits about you – or at least people with the same name as you. 

Aside from that you can setup alerts for anything you are interested in.  Small business owners will want to have alerts for their company name or small business.  Create alerts related to any hobbies or interests you might have.

OFFICE 2003 TIMESAVING TECHNIQUES FOR DUMMIES

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Talk Email

We love to hear from our readers. Feel free to write to us with your experiences, questions, gripes and loves about all things email. Send mail to talkemail@woodyswatch.com - all names and personal details are kept confidential.


This copy of Woody's Email Essentials was sent directly to:  MCD311
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Woody's Email Essentials

Editor: Rose Vines   Editor-in-Chief: Peter Deegan

Copyright (c) 2004 Peter Deegan and Rose Vines. All rights reserved. ISSN 1448-8655

POSTED BY on 3:27 pm under

My son Alex's @nd birthday.
Posted by MCD311

College Ball

POSTED BY on 10:05 am under
Message
I just got a nice note from a bloke called Yoni as follows:
 
 
    Hey-

      Nice blog! Glad you enjoy NBA 'ball.

      Hoping you could add a link to my "college basketball blog," collegeball.blogspot.com, to your site. I'd very much appreciate a link.

      And would gladly return the favor, adding a link from my site to yours.

      Thanks!

     yoni cohen,  
    http://collegeball.blogspot.com  
     college basketball blog 
 
Now being a long way from the US of A I follow the college hoops a lot less than the NBA
Plus we don't even get good NBA coverage on TV let alone college
Basically I usually see a little of the sweet 16 and that's it
The last few years I watch just to try and work out who the Celtics will draft! :( very sad
 
But I know some people are very passionate about College ball 
 Yoni's site seems terrific and jam packed
Apparently a lot of journo's read it 
Check it out!

More posts

POSTED BY on 7:05 pm under
 
 Just a further comment on the 2nd part of Eric's advice

I cant believe that most people don't own their own domain name
I own about 5 and don't have even one website up and alive!
E.g. I own the domain mcd311.biz - cost me $4.95 US a year for 3 years = about $20 Aussie

Why would you want a domain without a website - for email.
Here's what I do.

Let's say I discover this great new website and I want to subscribe to their forums or their newsletter.
I own the domain mcd311.biz and can control all email sent to that domain so when asked for an email address I put in abc@mcd311 .biz where abc is a word or phrase to remind me of the site. eg myb@mcd311 .biz

You then setup the forwarding for your domain. If your domain is hosted by an isp then they do this for you but it is very easy to go to someone like www.mydomain.com or www.godaddy.com to buy the domain and use their free services to set it up yourself.

I have my domain set up to forward all email from that domain to a specific address using a catchall.
So if anything is sent to an address ending in @mcd311.biz it gets forwarded to my 'real' address.

Then I monitor what comes to me. If I start getting spammed at a specific address I just cancel the forwarding for that mail and it bounces back to the sender.
So if myb@mcd311 gets picked up by spammers I just come here, login and change my address to a new one and then go to my domain host and set myb@mcd311 to bounce and voila!

The best thing of all is I am ISP independent and advertising myself.
Why would you advertise Telstra or Optus or whoever when you can advertise yourself!
mail@yourbusiness makes a lot more sense to advertise than yourbusiness@bogpond etc.
Plus if you get sick of bigpond and move to a local ISP (recommended!) then you just set your email to forward to your new address.
No change in advertising - your customer is still sending to mail@yourbusiness they don't notice any difference at all

Anyway that's another cheap (but not free) way to fight the spam war.
 
Matt Dell