FW: WEE #2.09 - Google Alerts by email

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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.

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