Google Alerts is an online service that notifies you via email of the latest web content on a particular topic. The content can range from news and current events, business information, product and technology reviews, sports - practically anything you search on the Internet. Just as with using the popular search engine, setting up Google Alerts involves defining the topic through keywords. Here are some guidelines on how to setup this online service.
1. Go to the Google Alerts homepage. The homepage's URL is http://www.google.com/alerts. Once there you'll immediately see a section labeled ‘Create a Google Alert.' You need to fill in or choose options in this section.
2. Enter your search terms. You need to be as specific as possible when inputting your search queries so that you get more relevant results. Apply the operators used in the search engine such as quotation marks, plus and minus signs and the ‘site:' operator. Quotation marks on a phrase queries the phrase exactly as typed. A dash or minus sign before a word excludes that word from the search. A plus sign before a word queries the word exactly as it is, eliminating synonyms and spelling variations. The ‘site:' operator focuses the query only on specific websites.
3. Choose the type of content. The Type drop-down list allows you to choose the kind or the form of content to be updated on based on the categories used in the general search engine. The first choice is ‘Everything' and that means any and all types of web content from text to videos. Other choices are ‘News' which takes only Google news results, ‘Blogs' displays results from a blog search, ‘Videos' presents only results from videos search, etc.
4. Define the frequency of alerts and the number of results. The next settings you need to define are how often you will receive Google Alerts notifications and how many results you'll get each time. These settings are on the ‘How often:' and ‘Email length:' drop-down lists respectively. You can choose to get results ‘as-it-happens' which means you'll get alerts as soon as something new turns up. For less frequency there are daily and weekly options. Afterwards you can set whether to get a maximum of 20 or 50 results per notification.
5. Enter your email address. The final step is to type in the email address where you want to receive the Google Alerts notifications. Take note that it is not necessary to have a Google or Gmail account. If such is the case, Google Alerts will first send you a verification to confirm the authenticity of the email address you typed in. Click on the link in the verification notice you received. Afterwards the alert you created will be active.
Although it is not necessary to have a Google account to make use of the Google Alerts service, having one will give you access to more options such as getting the alerts through RSS feed and even exporting them in CSV format.
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