I think most people use them for alerts about themselves or their company. Noise can be a problem sometimes but there is a good solution/hack for certain instan

I think most people use them for alerts about themselves or their company. Noise can be a problem sometimes but there is a good solution/hack for certain instances. You can set up a google alert to function similar to a google search. So if you're getting only junk from http://foobar.com http://foobar.com you could set up the alert to be as follows: "your name" -site:"http://foobar.com http://foobar.com " This will return matches for "your name" but exclude those alerts from http://foobar.com http://foobar.com. Very useful if you're getting a lot of inbox clutter.