Google Alerts – Catch the news as it breaks
Google Alerts makes staying current as simple as checking your email every morning. You can use Google Alerts to look for anything that appears in a news story, blog post, Google Groups thread or anywhere else on the Internet. Just go to google.com/alerts and enter the term or terms you’re interested in, along with the sources you’d like to see results from, how often you want to receive the alerts and your e-mail. You can create up to 1,000 alerts per email address, and you can update your preferences at any time by following the links at the bottom of any Alerts email you receive.
If you’re in a media-sensitive environment, such as a public relations or political campaign, you can create alerts that let you know whenever you or your client appear in the headlines – as soon as the news breaks. You can be the first to know when something happens to your favorite selebrity, when a review appears for a new movie you’d like to see, or when a new lolcats site goes live.
But Alerts are also very useful for webmasters and news publishers who want to track the inclusion of their content in Google News. Using search operators — like the site: operator, which returns search results from a specific domain (i.e. searching for “site:nytimes.com” will return all articles from the New York Times) — a news publisher can get a daily email listing a selection of articles from their site that made it into Google News. And of course, anyone can use Alerts to notify them when a new post goes live on their favorite news site, or when something happens involving one of their competitors.
With millions of pages being updated every day on the still-nascent Web, it can be difficult for mere mortals to stay up-to-date. Thankfully, with Alerts, you can rely on the world’s largest search engine to help you out.
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