Are you interested in keeping tabs on something specific out in the web or in the blogosphere? Ever wondered how PR firms manage to contact you right after you posted a nasty comment about their client on your personal blog? Or are you fascinated in tracking just how internet famous you’ve become? Google Alerts may help.
Now this is really nothing new and it has been around for years. I think it may just be hitting mainstream users now with more people interconnecting through social networks and adopting blogging habits. Here is the gist. Google Alerts is a great little tool that can automate a search term and have new results pushed to your email. Lets see an example of an alert I use.
I’m interested in tracking where my full name shows up out on the internet. This sometimes helps me see where my work is getting quoted or where my name is popping up in community lists. Starting with the Google homepage, I test out the search query I’ll use. I could just enter:
The problem with this is that I will get results that include ones with ‘aaron’ and ‘worsham’ as separate parts instead of a full name. I’d like to have it look for ‘aaron worsham’ as a phrase, so how about:
This is better. However, now my results are cluttered with my own blog entries. Lets try to filter them out:
That should do the trick. site: is used to isolate what site you want to search while the minus in front of it excludes the site. In this case the () are use to allow more than one site.
Once I have my search term, I can go to the alerts page, login with my Google username, and add an alert for this search query. Options are limited, so I just used email me once a day with the results from the whole web. There, now I can stare off into my reflection until I drown from the comfort of my own email client.
Alerts can be setup for most anything that you want. Company name, client name, industry terms are all good use cases. Its smart enough to only send you new results within the given window, which means you can do really geeky things with the results like plot buzz trends over time for popular terms or track advertisement effectiveness. I’m sure there are other uses that I haven’t mentioned. How are you using Google Alerts?