Creating an Advanced Google Alert

Create an alert to be notified when specific information about a particular topic is posted on the Internet in a news article, in a Google Group, or on the Web. Create advance Google Alerts to focus your search, and thereby receiving exactly the information you want as an alert. The process is very similar to performing advanced searches through any of the other Google services, such as the Google Web search. The following is an example of creating an advanced News Alert. You can follow similar steps for creating Web and Group Alerts.

Here are the steps for creating the example Advanced News Alert shown in Figure 10.2:

1. Click the Advanced news search link found on the Google News page (http://news.google.com).

2. In the “Find results” area, type Barry Bonds in the with all the words box.

3. Type home run in the with the exact phrase box.

4. In the with at least one of these words box, type hits, record.

5. In the without the words box, type trainer.

6. In the News source box type MLB.com, San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters, CNN.

7. In the Location box, type U.S.

8. The last two boxes, Occurrences and Date are not important for you to create your alert so leave them unchanged.

9. Click Google Search.

10. After completing step 9, you will be on the search results page. The search box contains a search string created from the information you specified when completing the Advanced News search page. Copy the search string found in the Google News search box. The example in the above steps creates a search string that looks like this: “Barry Bonds “home run” hits, OR record -trainer source:MLB.com, San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters, cnn location:usa”.

11. Go to your Alerts home page. The Google News search results page will have a link to My Account located in the upper right corner of the page.

12. In the Search terms box on the Create a Google Alert page, paste the search string copied from step 10.

13. Select a service to search from the Type selection list. For this example, select News.

14. Choose a frequency from the How often selection list. For this example, choose as-it-happens.

15. Click Create Alert.

    
    Figure 10.2: Use Advanced News Search to narrow your search, creating better News Alerts.

In this example you have created an Advanced News Alert. The following table (Table 10.1) shows the string taken from the News page divided into different parts and a description of what it does.

Table 10.1: Analyzing the Example Search String
Open table as spreadsheet

String	Function
Barry Bonds	Tells Google you are looking for information about Barry Bonds.
“home run”	Google will search for the exact phrase home run. The main topic of interest is home runs hit by Barry Bonds.
hits or record	In this alert you are interested in knowing when Barry hits another home run and if he breaks another record.
trainer	Exclude alerts about Barry Bonds’ trainer. Each time news breaks about Barry Bonds you will not receive an alert when the article includes anything about his trainer.
source:MLB.com, San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters, CNN	You have told Google to find news from these sources.
Location:U.S.	This specifies that only news generated in the U.S. will trigger the alert.

It’s a good idea to use Advanced Alerts when you find yourself receiving e-mail not related to the exact topic you were hoping to be alerted about.