You can get email notifications any time that Google finds new results on a topic you’re interested in. For example, you could get updates about a product you like, keep up with news stories on particular topics or find out when people post content about you on the web, (this is called a Vanity Search).
Perform Automated Vanity Searches and Find Out Who’s Talking About You
One of the best uses for Google Alerts is to keep track of how often people are talking about you on the web and what they’re saying. It’s a great way to get, entirely for free, a service for which PR companies charge an arm and a leg.
All you have to do is type in your name or the name of your organisation/company in the search query field. Tell Alerts whether you want all results or just the high quality ones, when you want them delivered, and how you want them sent to you (you can have them sent via email or have Alerts generate an RSS feed for you to subscribe to).
Set up an Alert
Visit Google alerts
- In the “Create an alert about” box, enter in the words you want to get email notifications for.
- Click Show options to customise things like how often you get alerts, types of websites you want to search, and the email address for your alerts.
- Click Create Alert.
You can also create an alert by clicking the + next to any of the suggested topics that you see on the Google Alerts page.
Try to be as precise as possible. The more precise your search terms are, the more relevant your alerts will be.
Use quotes around a group of words if you are looking for them together. For example, [“adventure park”].
If you want to see some screenshots and info on how more detailed searches are set up, see C/Net for how to set up Google alerts
