With Google Alert, you can automatically track anything on the web all the time!

Selected as BBC's Website of the Day and USA Today's Hot Site, Google Alert helps you keep up to date on the things that are most important to you. Google Alert is the web's leading automated search and web intelligence solution. It operates a series of daily Google searches just for you and emails you whenever new results appear.

For those people who just don't have time to sit around running Web searches. Sign up for an account at googlealert.com and it does all the work for you. Once you enter a few keywords and tell it how often to search, "googlealert" will automatically deposit search results in your e-mail box just about as often as you request.

What is Google Alert?

Google Alert lets you automate the process of running everyday repetitive search queries on the Internet.

Many people use Google Alert to keep track of what the web is saying about them, their interests or projects they are involved in. You can use Google Alert to keep track of any time someone mentions your name on the web. You can also track mentions of your website, your place of work, or your favourite hobby or celebrity. The uses are pretty much limited only by your imagination.

This makes it easy to keep up with any topic you're interested in. Simply create a set of keywords, and Google Alert will run a search each day, and will automatically send you an email alert when the query produces new results.

What types of people use Google Alert?

The free Google Alert service enables people in over 120 countries to stay up to date with their interests. Users include everyday Internet users, business people, journalists, marketers, IT professionals, solicitors, doctors, salespeople, teachers, and researchers, just about anybody.

Sooner or later, I think every Internet user or small business entrepreneur will have typed his or her own name or company into a search engine, most probably Google itself, just to see what comes up. This is called EgoSearching, but Googling yourself in person to see if you are listed on the Internet is just soooo last year. Googlealert.com will e-mail you links about you (or if we are serious for a moment… any other subjects you care to find) whenever Google finds them.

What about business, is there any benefits for them?

It could be quite useful as a competitive intelligence tool. You can track competitors, industries, trends -- in short, the kind of information that researchers spend hours trying to find each and every day.

Which means you can monitor any publicity about your competitors' Web sites as well as whether the name of your business or its products / services are mentioned in somebody's business pages somewhere.

There are clearly possibilities for the future. Google Alert could be applied to let businesses keep track of where they, their competitors or their partners are mentioned on the Web. The possibilities are endless. Furthermore, the HTML and RSS feeds, now in beta, could allow organisations to integrate live Google Alert results into their Web sites.

How often does Google Alert perform my searches?

Google Alert performs your searches at least once per day. You can change this frequency by changing the systems search settings. From the search settings page you can select the number of results you want and how often (daily, every two days, weekly, twice a week) you want a search to run. There's also a "run now" button that returns instant results.

Remember of course that Google Alert is dependent on Google for its results, so you will only get a response from Google Alert when Google updates its index (this usually happens once every day or so).

You can also view your results online by clicking "Browse Results".

Got any good “Search Ideas”, tips or traps?

For You or Your Website – Many people, for reasons best known only to them, like to know what the web is saying about them. All you do is simply type your name, into the first search term box, e.g. "Jennifer Lacey". Google Alert will then automatically notify you when it finds a new mention of your name on the web. You can also try names of friends or family or colleagues – for that matter your “enemies”.

For Projects, hobbies or Interests – Other people will often use Google Alert to keep track of projects they are involved in, or places where they work. Simply type in the name of the project or organisation and Google Alert will notify you when it finds a new mention of it on the web. You could also try your school or hobby interests.

Be Specific – Try to be as specific as you can when entering your search terms. The more key words you provide, the more relevant and refined the results Google Alert will return. For example, why is yak meat low in fat and cholesterol, typing yak+ fat+ cholesterol will give you much more relevant results than typing in the word yak.

Put Terms or Phrases in Quotes – It often helps to put quotation marks around phrases and names like "Jen Lacey" or “Yak Fat” to make sure Google Alert only returns the things that you are looking for.

Google Alert also allows you to use the advanced features of Google's search engine such as language, country, Boolean search terms, parts of the page, and more. As you might expect you can also limit your search to a country or language.

Why is there a limit on the number of search results?

Google Alert is a free service but Internet access costs money. Google's terms prohibit commercial use so you can't even pay Google Alert for more results. In the future, Google Alert hopes to launch a premium commercial service with much greater capacity. Negotiations are currently under way with Google to arrange a license for this.

Does this site belong to Google?

No, the site is not affiliated with Google.com. Google Alert however is very much focused on searching Google. Google is the source of the information and very much the foundation of the information used by Google Alert.

The goal was to make Google Alert so clean and simple, that anyone who uses a search engine will also feel comfortable using this automated service. In my opinion, they have achieved their goal.

Arthur Hissey
Computer Research & Technology
www.crt.net.au