Google Alerts Help You Stay on Top of Important Trends

Ever wish you had someone to spend time combing the web looking for updates on topics that interest you? Do you need to stay on top of a story or news about a competitor but you haven’t the time? Do you want to know what’s going on in your industry or in your area? Do you want to watch your reputation or news about your organization in the news? Well, Google has a solution. Don’t you just love the idea of vast numbers of intelligent geeks are sitting around all day trying to solve all sorts of business problems?

Google Alerts have been around in Beta form for some time. However, I am rather a Johnny-come-lately to them. I am just now realizing their potential. First, what are Google alerts? In the words of Google themselves,

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

How do you get a Google Alert set up. Simply go to google.com/alerts and enter the keywords of the topics that interest you (could simply be your company name) and provide an email address. You then make a selection of the following:

Frequency

As it happens
Daily
Weekly

What you want Google to search

Comprehensive
News
Blogs
web
video
groups

Tell Google where to deliver the information and you’re ready to start receiving your updates

Google will of course, ask you to verify that it was you and not someone else who put in the request and that’s it. You can have up to 1000 different alerts but I think that much email would overwhelm me….and any normal person.

If you’re interested in checking Google Alerts out, I suggest you go to http://www.google.com/alerts and sign up for one to start with. You can read more about alerts at http://www.google.com/support/alerts/.

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Thanks again for reading.