Google Alerts
Encyclopedia
Google Alerts is content change detection and notification
Change Detection and Notification
Internet change detection and notification refers to automatic detection of changes made to World Wide Web pages and notification to interested users by email or other means. Whereas search engines are designed to find web pages, CDN systems are designed to monitor changes to web pages...
service, offered by the search engine
Search engine
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...
company Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
, that automatically notifies users when new content from news, web, blogs, video and/or discussion groups matches a set of search terms selected by the user and stored by the Google Alerts service. Notifications can be sent by email
E-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
, as a web feed
Web feed
A web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation, which is performed by an aggregator...
or displayed on the users iGoogle
IGoogle
iGoogle , a service of Google, is a customizable Ajax-based startpage or personal web portal . Google originally launched the service in May 2005...
page. The service is available to the general public as an open beta release.
Google Alerts only provides content from Google's own search engine
Search engine
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...
.
Currently there are six types of alerts sent when new content matches the search terms of the alert:
- Everything - (default setting) aggregates News, Web and Blogs
- News - sent when matching content makes it into the top ten results of a Google NewsGoogle NewsGoogle News is a free news aggregator provided by Google Inc, selecting recent items from thousands of publications by an automatic aggregation algorithm....
search - Web - sent when new web pages appear in the top twenty results for a Google Web search
- Blogs - sent when matching content appears in the top ten results of a Google Blog Search
- Video - sent when matching content appears in the top ten results of a Google video search
- Groups - sent when matching content appears in the top fifty results of a Google GroupsGoogle GroupsGoogle Groups is a service from Google Inc. that supports discussion groups, including many Usenet newsgroups, based on common interests. The service was started in 1995 as Deja News, and was transitioned to Google Groups after a February 2001 buyout....
search
Users determine the frequency of checks for new results. Three options are available: "once a day", "once a week", or "as it happens". These options set the maximum frequency of alerts and do not necessarily control how often they will receive alerts. Alerts are sent only if new content matches the user-selected search terms.
The first option, for example, means they will receive at most one alert email per day. The "as it happens" option can result in many alert emails per day, depending on the search.
Google Alerts are available in plain text as well as HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
. In October 2008 Google also made alerts available as RSS feeds.