It really surprises me the amount of people who havn’t heard of google alerts, I love them, every time a word or phrase is mentioned on a blog, website, news article, groups post or video description (you can pick and choose), you get an email or now it can update an RSS feed! fantastic 
Many people like to search there name or nick name and see who has mentioned them recently (of course I do 
), this makes the job so much easier, you don’t need to look for new listings because they are automatically emailed to you.
I have quite a few google alerts set up these include
- My Name
- My Nickname
- Every site I own’s name
- Most of my competitors within those sectors
- News I want to keep tabs on
Add this to twitter search and your pretty much covered!
(Google alerts does have its downsides, for one there is a tonne of email, it sometimes doesn’t send an email (Its a Google BETA of course!), and sometimes it sends pages a few times)
What are you thoughts, do you use any similar tools, do you hate Google Alerts? Love it?…Comment!
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I use it for vanity searches and work and it’s great for throwing up sites you wouldn’t normally find. There’s an NFL coach called Mike Nolan so I add exclusions to the query to cut out some of the crap.
Been using Google Alerts for a number of years, but recently I’ve been getting a lot of irrelevant items. My business name is “R K W Internet” and lately lots of results that just show the initials RKW have been returned.
Now I thought I’d set up google alerts to just return results for R K W Internet”, not R K W/RKW (google seems to ignore spaces) but guess I’ll have to double-check.
In the main though I like it. And it certainly beats the cr*p out of vanity searching.
Richard Williams’s last blog post..Coffee and WiFi
I’ve got my name, my websites, the places I work (or have worked) for & also “photographer arrested” … don’t ask
Stuart Grimshaw’s last blog post..Making things better.
My every-other-day-news-roundups on my Nottingham Forest site couldn’t happen without Google Alerts.
Baz’s last blog post..News Roundup: Transfer tittle-tattle, Lewis makes the top 20, KFC reminisces about the good ol’ days, sickly City Ground
@mike indeed theres another dominic hodgson thats quite popular in google
@richard i’ve noticed the same with “schwagging” brings up all stories with the word schwag…
@stuart do tell..
@baz how many keywords do you track?
I find a great way to do it is to mash the feeds through Yahoo Pipes first, do a bit of filtering on it there and then subscribe to the single feed in the feed reader.