Have you ever wished you had a personal assistant to do those time consuming web searches for you to keep track of your competition, keep abreast of what others are saying about you, find out the latest medical advances or news on a topic you blog about? Wish no longer, your assistant is here and ready to serve: Google Alerts.

Google Alerts is an automated search tool that crawls the entire web to gather the personalized information you request, sending you the results by email or feed. Unlike other alert services, Google Alerts isn’t limited to only news sites. It monitors the entire web, giving it a much broader and deeper reach. Though Google Alerts is not affiliated with Google, it does focus on searching Google and, like Google, allows for advanced search options so you can restrict your search by date, language, file format and other options.

With Google Alerts, you can do simple searches or target searches by including or excluding keywords. You can select for updated pages only, search only specific websites, choose your delivery format and more. You can choose the frequency of the alerts from as-it-happens, daily or weekly. It can help you target more precisely over time by suggesting additional keywords based on results you found valuable before.

Google Alerts has been praised by many users that include journalists, lawyers, marketers, doctors, salespeople, educators and government employees.  It is particularly valuable for business. Alerts can be set to track what’s being said about your company, your competitors and your industry. Any negative information can be addressed quickly and positive information can be highlighted for PR. Bloggers can maintain a continuous flow of post inspirations and topics.

Google Alerts is a product of Indigo Stream Technologies Ltd. The company was co-founded by Gideon Greenspan that offers the Copyscape service.

Categories: Glossary
Tags: Google alerts, rss