Use Alerts to Push Query Results to your Inbox

Google News is one of the best news source around, pulling stories from over 4,500 sources. One of it’s best features is being able to search the news by the actual words found in the articles. This is great for a one time query, but it’s a lot of work to do this continually if there is something you wish to “watch.”

That’s where Google alerts come in. You can set up alerts to “push” the news to you as it happens! You use the same powerful search criteria as you would with a news search. You can set up more than one alert, and you can individually set them to be delivered as the news happens, once a day or once a week.

Not only will the alerts deliver news search results to your inbox, but they will also send you web search results! Yes, the top results of a search you’d see in a standard web search can be delivered to you as well.

How could this be useful to you?

• Track a news story in which you are interested
• Keep an eye on a competitor
• Keep up to date on your favorite actor or other personality
• Monitor a drug you are taking
• Put your own name in the search to see what’s said about you

To get started, go the Google Alerts page. If you don’t yet have a Google Account, create one. From there it’s a simple matter to follow the instructions to create an alert. You’ll specify the search term, if you are searching news articles, web pages or both, and the frequency of the email delivery. All your alerts will be listed in the table on the page and you can change or delete them at any time.

To keep you from getting flooded with email alerts, Google limits your alerts. It’s probably easiest to explain this by quoting what Google says:

“A ‘News’ alert is an email that lets you know if new articles make it into the top ten results of your Google News search. A ‘Web’ alert is an email that lets you know if new web pages appear in the top twenty results for your Google Web search. A ‘News & Web’ alert is an email that lets you know when new articles related to your search term make it into the top ten results for a Google News search or the top twenty results for a Google Web search.”

Before deciding on your search criteria you should go to the News page and test it out with a standard news search. Refine it until you get the desired results. Then, use this exact same search criteria in the alert.

If you find that you are receiving too many alerts with too many search results, you need to refine your search further. Most people don’t know that you can do more than simply just key in a few terms. Read Google’s Advanced Search page to see all the ways you can define a search.