[from Woody's Email Essentials, Editor: Rose Vines, Editor-in-Chief: Peter
Deegan, Copyright (c) 2004 Peter Deegan and Rose Vines. All rights
reserved. ISSN 1448-8655. Email to join : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
A nifty new email service
by Peter Deegan
Google keeps coming up with clever uses of their search technology and one
of the recent arrivals is Google Alerts. With Alerts you can setup
favorite search terms and get an email when there are changes in the top
pages returned from that search.
The service is currently in beta but is available to all comers, much in
the same way that Google News has been in beta for the last three years.
To setup alerts go to www.google.com/alerts you have the option to ‘sign
in’ and create an account. I suggest you do that because it is easier to
manage your alerts later.
Each Alert is made up of three parts:
Search Term
Any search string you’d use in Google will work here.
You may want to exclude a particular web site from your search for
example your own or company web site and you can do that by using the
site:<domain> addition to a Google search.
Searching for a specific phrase needs double quote marks around it. This
is commonly used to look for word combinations instead of any page that has
the words in any order.
Tip: you can easily make complex Google searches by going to their
Advanced Search Page , make up the search there and click ‘Google
Search’. The selections you’ve made are converted into a search string
which you can copy into a Google Alert.
Type
Each Alert can cover the entire web (just like a search from the main
Google page) or just news services (same as a search from news.google.com)
or both.
While you can combine the Web and News searches into one alert, I prefer to
keep them separate so there are two alerts for the same search term with
one for Web and the other for News.
The alerts don’t tell you about every search result and when they change
in many cases that would mean extremely long emails. Google Alerts tells
you about changes in the top 20 results for the Web search or the top 10
results for the News search.
How often
This is how often you’ll get an Alert sent by email. Your choices are
‘once a week’, ‘once a day’ or ‘as it happens’.
If you really want to get a lot of email then choose a popular search and
choose ‘as it happens’.
Chances are you’ll want to limit the frequency to Daily. Each alert can
have a different frequency so you can have some Daily and others Weekly.
Confirmation
Once you have created an alert you’ll receive an email message asking for
confirmation of the alert. Just click on the link and the Alert is
established.
Changes and Deletion
Just go back to www.google.com/alerts to change, add or delete your alerts.
@ Whitelisting
To make sure you get your alerts, make sure that the domain google.com or
the address [EMAIL PROTECTED] is added to your white-list or
safe senders list.
@ What is it good for?
As predicted by Sir Arthur C. Clarke many years ago in The Fountains of
Paradise, the first alert for most people has to be their own name. You
can get an automatic email when the web or news has new and popular hits
about you or at least people with the same name as you.
Aside from that you can setup alerts for anything you are interested
in. Small business owners will want to have alerts for their company name
or small business. Create alerts related to any hobbies or interests you
might have.
------------------------------------------
Abçs.
g.
Guilherme R Basilio
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
http://transconsult.com.br
Novo telefone/new phone: +55 21 3387 1819
_______________________________________________
MT-List mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.computing.dcu.ie/mailman/listinfo/mt-list