So many of you have shared good comments about using Google Alert’s that I felt the need to write a little follow-up content.
I often get the same email several times in a row …
This is one reason that RSS is so useful. Duplicates are generally erradicated by RSS newsreaders. Although I like Google Alerts, there are many intelligence-gathering tasks that I push over to RSS. Alerts is very handy for those ad-hoc information-gathering requirements that flair up, and eventually subside.
How do you find the most relevant topics? Do you only look at the first few?
It’s important to note that Google Alerts is an extension of Google Search. Given this, the most relevant are typically the first few, so it makes sense that stories that fall below the first 10 are probably not going to resonate with the subject you are blogging about.
This is more of a tutorial about Goggle searches…
Many of you have mentioned the issues with getting more refined results. Here’s an example that might help you zero in on exactly the right mix of information flowws.
Imagine you wanted all news stories about “Iraqi Freedom” but only those stories that have a relationship with Russia or Putin. You could make a News Alerts query like this:
"iraqi freedom"
That will return about 1800 pages, and indicates you might see a high rate of alerts. You could change the query to really zero in.
"iraqi freedom" (Putin|Russia)
This query will pick up any stories with “Iraqi Freedom” in the story, but only if the story also contains either “Putin” or “Russia”. There are only about 22 stories in Google that meet this specification.
By using advanced boolean logic in your queries, you can fine-tune the ranges of alerts.
1 comment
2/27/2005 at 1:15 pm
Megan R
Thank you very much for this post! I was definately not aware that you could specify that you wanted to look for one phrase OR another one, as opposed to both. I use Google search almost daily, so this will definately help me refine my searches from now on.