I want to keep track of all mentions of our competitor in the news and understand I can use Google Alerts for this task. What is it and how do I get it set up?
Google Alerts is a terrific service that very few people seem to know about, even though it’s been around for quite a long time. It’s part of Google News, another nifty service that I use every day to keep track of the latest breaking news. Google News — at news.google.com — scours hundreds of news services from Associated Press to BBC World News, Huffington Post to Fox News, analyzes all the latest stories and shows what’s happening, with updates every few minutes. If it’s a breaking story, Google News has it and offers up a variety of courses for you to explore. Darn useful!
One side benefit of Google analyzing news services and having such a deep background in search is that it’s easy for the company to offer up news alerts, a service that lets you specify what word, phrase, company name or even person’s name you’re interested in and have it automatically email you any breaking news that matches. Every business should have something like this running both for news about themselves and their competitors, actually.
These alerts are easy to set up too. To start, pop over to Google News. The top of the page looks like this:
There are plenty of things you can tweak, including what edition and what layout you want, but we’re interested in setting up a Google Alert, so let’s stay focused!
One area I’ve been tracking news is with autonomous vehicles, specifically news about what Toyota Motor Company is doing in the autonomous car space. A good topic for an alert. To start, I’ll simply type it in as a search:
Be careful here that you choose the search news option with your search.
The search results are stories from the news sources:
Some really interesting sounding stories, and notice the range of news sources too: PC Magazine, Tech Times, The Detroit News and Crain’s Detroit Business are all matches.
Here’s the hardest part of the entire process, though: You need to scroll past all these really interesting stories so that you get to the bottom of the page, where you’ll find:
That’s what you seek! Click on the “Create alert” button.
Before you click “Create Alert” a second time, however, I strongly encourage you to “Show options” as there are a number of settings you’ll want to consider before proceeding:
The most important of these is probably frequency. By default alerts are sent at most once a day, but you can change it so that alerts show up more frequently… or less. Then look at the other options too, there’s quite a bit you can do.
I generally use all the defaults, however, because they’re easily modified down the road if they seem to show up too frequently or you’re missing news because the once/weekly is too long to wait for hot news.
Click on “Create Alert” once you’ve got them set to your own liking. Done!
You can get to this screen any time and the two icons make it very obvious how to edit the alert (the pencil icon) or delete the alert entirely (the trashcan). That’s it. Now you have the full power of Google watching hundreds of news sources for the information you specify.
And as for me, I’m heading back to that search results page to read up on Toyota’s autonomous vehicle research…
Phil S. do you use ancient information to justify your comments? Have you seen any current info not 2013. Or do you have an axe to grind.
Google Alerts has been broken for a couple of years. It barely works at all.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/broken-google-alerts-heres-move/81769/
There are a couple of other free services out there that do much the same thing and work reasonably well – better than Google Alerts, for sure.
Surprised to read this as I’ve been using Google Alerts with good results for quite a long time…
Yeah, I used to get good results too; now, not so much. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. It really surprises me that Google haven’t addressed the problem – whatever the problem is.