Quick Tutorial: Google Alerts (Part Two – How To Set Up Alerts)

In part one of my two-part Google Alert tutorial, I went over some reasons why setting up alerts might be a good idea. Here in part two, we’ll deal with some nuts and bolts of actually setting up the alerts.

To start setting up your Google Alerts, go to http://www.google.com/alerts. On the right hand side of the screen, you’ll seeThose four fields are all you’ll need to fill out to set up an alert. I’ll mostly be talking about the top field, search terms, but quickly on the others…

Type

This allows you to choose if you want to search news sources, blogs, the web, and even videos and groups. Comprehensive gives you the results from news, blogs, and the web (and is what I use on all my alerts).

How often

This lets you say how often you want to receive alert notifications – once a day, once a week, or as-it-happens (meaning as Google finds a new mention of your search term). Personally, for my alerts, once a week would never make sense – many conversations I’d want to be involved in are done within a week – but I use both other options for different alerts.

Your email

Unsurprisingly, this is where you enter the email address you want your alerts delivered to. If you are going to be getting lots of alerts, you might want to set up an email account just for them. I don’t receive enough to make that necessary, even when I’ve chosen to receive “as-it-happens” updates.

Search terms

Here’s where the good stuff happens – you enter the search term you want an alerts on and, in fact, that’s what you get alerts on. Some care needs to be taken, however, lest you be overwhelmed with results (searching for Smith, for example) or get results that aren’t what you were hoping for.

To go through some of the problems and ways to fine tune your search, I’m going to use myself as an example.

If I set up an alert using Greg Pincus as my search term, I’ll get notified every time those words appear in that order on a blog, a new web page, or in the news. This seems safe enough, as Pincus isn’t a common name. However, when the movie Ghost Town came out, I received endless alerts. Why?

The movie co-starred Greg Kinnear and had a main character named Bertram Pincus (the first time, by the way that I can recall a Pincus main character!). As a result, every article that mentioned those two names in that order flagged my alert – Google saw Greg and Pincus. Not fun nor the type of information I wanted.

The solution in situations like that is to use a more complex search term. In this case, that involved using quotation marks around my name like this: “Greg Pincus”.

The quotation marks mean that I am only interested in search results that have those two words consecutively. This instantly got rid of the Ghost Town references.

However, Greg Pincus happens to be the name of an X-Files character and, while he’s not written about very often anymore, let’s say I wanted to get rid of those results, too.

I could add other words to the search term – “Greg Pincus” writer, for example. Sometimes, I fine tune word choice by trying different alerts to see if they give me good results. But sometimes, just adding a word is not enough, particularly if you’re trying to get very specific information.

The great thing is, you can use boolean modifiers to help you! Or, if you’re like me and kinda glaze over when people say “boolean,” you can use Google’s advanced search feature to help you.

Advanced Search

When you go to Google.com, you can find the link to the advanced search to the right of the search box:

Once you click on Advanced Search, you’ll see a screen with many choices you can fill in. The ones you’ll probably use most frequently are at the top

In my above example, I’d put Greg Pincus in the “this exact wording or phrase” field and then add X-Files to the last field, telling Google I don’t want to see pages that mention X-Files.

Once you’ve filled out your fields, click on the Advanced Search button at the bottom of the page. This will then do a Google search for you, and will convert your advanced search terms into a format Google recognizes (yes, we’re back to booleans!).

Check the search results to see if they are the type you’re looking for. If they are, go to the search line at the top of your screen, highlight the search term, and copy it. Then bring up the Google Alert page, paste that term into the Search terms line and click Create Alert.

In my example, my search term looks like this: “Greg Pincus” -X-Files

That told Google to give me results with the words Greg Pincus consecutively but without (minus sign) X-Files. I  have used this alert for years now, and it’s done well by me!

That’s a very quick tutorial on Google Alerts. You can learn much more about the search options if you’d like. Also, there are a few logistical advantages of having a Google account and doing your alerts with the email associated with that account. But this should be more than enough to get you and keep you going.

And if you’ve got questions or good Google alert stories, I’d love to hear ‘em.

Tagged as: googlealerts, tutorial