Google Alerts

February 20, 2007 in 3 out of 5 stars, A service, Free

What is it?


Google Alerts: A service where Google will send you an email anytime a term you specify is found by its crawler. In other words: roughly any time a certain term is used on the Internet.

Googlealerts

Who makes it?

Google

Why is it the killerest?

Because you can use it to watch what others are saying about you, your business, your industry or whatever else would give you a competitive advantage.

If desired, you can narrow it down to just what blogs, or the news say about a search term. You can also limit how often it emails you. From as-it-happens to once a week.

This service use to be horrible, inaccurate, incomplete, and late when it worked at all. About a month ago something magic happened and suddenly it works as advertised.

How much does it cost?

Free

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

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I still find it pretty inaccurate or many months late. Technorati (with probably 1/100th the web penetration of Google) catches stuff better.

Posted by: Ashley | Feb 20, 2007 10:46:15 AM

Great find! Every web marketer should be utilizing this service! As well, if I were a CEO I would keep track of my business in blogs AS IT HAPPENS.

Thanks!

Posted by: Doug Karr | Feb 20, 2007 6:19:28 PM

Can end up with a bunch of alerts if you dont put your searches in quotation marks. Pretty neat to see them come in tho.

Posted by: janet | Feb 23, 2007 5:05:09 PM

I do love this tool and have been using it for a year or so now. It's not perfect though and far from complete coverage. So do use it in combination with other search push&pull services. Use it in a smart way though and like doug said: Use "quotation marks"!

Posted by: Henri van den Hoof | Mar 8, 2007 4:50:32 AM

Posted by: Brett | Oct 7, 2009 9:04:17 AM