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An Open Letter to Google: Google Alerts Now Useless
- leephillips 14y agoI have a dozen or so Google alerts in my set of RSS feeds (that I've just moved over[0] to Newsblur). I haven't noticed any major degradation, but I haven't tried to test the system. Can anyone suggest an alternative? [0]http://lee-phillips.org/newsblurred/ http://lee-phillips.org/newsblurred/
- cleverjake 14y agoI haven't noticed an issue myself, though I would be interested in hearing the average quality of each item over time (ie if the fewer items you are getting are the cream of the crop of the formerly larger amount).
- earbitscom 14y agoI absolutely get fewer of these. I would blame it on getting less press about our company, but they used to alert me when we posted new blog posts on our own company blog, and I never receive those anymore. I can confirm that Google Alerts we used to receive have stopped coming.
- eli 14y agoUh, those alerts appear to be set to find "Only the best results" rather than "All Results". So, yeah, you're getting fewer of them. Or am I missing something?
- arafalov 14y agoSo, is there a good comparable service? I know there is a bunch of social-media trackers, but Google Alerts (used to) search everything.
- josh2600 14y agoI have to say anecdotally that I have noticed my voluminous alerts reporting much less data. When we got TechCrunched I got a hit, but a piece in Gigaom took 4 days to hit my Google Alert. That's a fairly large web property with a good PageRank, so I'm not sure why it would take so long. Anyways, does anyone have an alternative service they can suggest?
- mkr-hn 14y agoI don't know if it's any good, but Bing has a news alert thing: http://www.bing.com/news http://www.bing.com/news It's near the bottom of the right sidebar.
- kanzure 14y agoDoes this do only news alerts, or is it also web searches?
- mkr-hn 14y agoDoesn't look like it. But I think someone is paying attention to that feedback form. I've submitted a lot of feedback, and saw changes that seemed to reflect my suggestions.
- gwern 14y agoLooks like it's new only, and a very small sample of the web. (For example, I searched one of my existing Alerts, "Hideaki Anno interview", and it turned up nothing at all but one page on my site. Even though I have at least two pages which should match...)
- jhund 14y agoI'd like to recommend https://intigi.com https://intigi.com as an alternative to Google Alerts. I'm one of the co-founders. We started building Intigi 2 years ago because we were frustrated with the limited query abilities of Google Alerts. Intigi is currently positioned for Marketers, however it's incredibly useful for anybody who wants to track online information: Intigi gives you the power of Lucene indexed search on the newest articles on the web. You can subscribe to Intigi curated sources, or add your own RSS feeds or Twitter home timeline, and then filter results using powerful Lucene queries (fields, boosting, phrases, slop, wildcards, stop words) and other filters (social signals, word count, publishing date, presence of image or video). Intigi delivers results once per day or once per week via email, or you can view results in realtime through the web interface. Disclaimers: I'm one of the co-founders and it's a for-pay product.
- cmorgan8506 14y agoI built http://www.feed-alert.com http://www.feed-alert.com for my own uses. Would consider building on it, if it grabs any notice.
- rocky1138 14y agoHaven't had a chance to fully test it out, but I love the interface. Never change.
- jimiHendrix 14y agoPlease offer something, _anything_, before I have to sign up with my email.
- niggler 14y agoWhile the essence of the message is fair, there are just way too many ads and moving parts on the page to read it. I could have mistaked it for forbes.com (to be fair, though, they don't have a big fullpage ad before the content) I dont begrudge websites that use ads, but in this case it really detracted from readability
- scholia 14y agoReally? This is how it looks on my PC, in Google Chrome.... http://imgur.com/NIQb4rU http://imgur.com/NIQb4rU
- niggler 14y agoThey changed that specific article's rendering. When I and others looked earlier today, it was a real mess. My original comment was near the top when "jpilcher" showed up (based on his responses, it was roughly 1-2 hours after I saw the article) and I suspect he read the comments and changed that specific page. Other articles still show the old format: http://thefinancialbrand.com/28313/cool-vehicle-designs-from-financial-institutions/ http://thefinancialbrand.com/28313/cool-vehicle-designs-from... (Notice the size of the ad on the right side as well as the interstitial ads) http://i.imgur.com/RekSTWf.jpg http://i.imgur.com/RekSTWf.jpg
- scholia 14y agoAh, sneaky! This is what it looks like here, at the moment http://imgur.com/tvcjehW http://imgur.com/tvcjehW The layout didn't attract my attention when I read the piece and posted it here. It felt like a fairly ordinary commercial site...
- nhebb 14y agoThat's weird. I'm getting a page with animated gif's on the right side that make the page unreadable. If I had epilepsy, there's a good chance that I'd be walking down the street naked right now.
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- aqrashik 14y agoI started using mention (https://en.mention.net/ https://en.mention.net/) which I came across on HN itself and I must say I'm really satisfied with it. I use it mainly for alerts about apps and services I develop and it does a good job of alerting me whenever someone mentions it on websites as well as in tweets etc.
- itry 14y agoPerfect example of a horror ui. It took me so long just to set up a simple alert, that now I hate mention.
- welcometothesky 14y agoI'm co-founder and lead designer at mention. I'll be glad to hear you tell us more about your experience. Can you send us an email at support@mention.net? We're currently working on the new version and first experience is one of our priority.
- itry 14y agoIts been a while. Let me try to remember... One thing was that at some point in the signup process it kicked me to another domain. erwaehnung.de or something. First it felt like i was tricked into something. Then I thought "ok, some ugly SEO stuff" and was a bit annoyed. The other thing was that after signing up, I was not logged in. Since I already forgot my password (put in some crap) i had to use the reset-password thingy. I remember, that later I had some problems adding keywords. I dont know why anymore, sorry. I have to say, that your service is good. Only the ui was annoying.
- davidjgraph 14y agoAnyone else getting bored of people whining about Google products they never paid for when there are alternatives, both free and pay-for?
- incongruity 14y agoI use google alerts. I'd pay (a little bit) for it, if I could keep the quality up. That is to say, I'm not at fault for using a freely offered (and long standing) free service and it is worth noting when the quality of such a service starts to suffer. Lastly, if you're doing it right, free is not "free of value" to the provider. Google, the search and information company could easily be gleaning something important from what people are using alerts for... and for what they click through on, etc. etc. and, as such, just because it's "free", it doesn't mean I'm not mindful (or entitled to the benefits) of the value I am providing.
- niggler 14y ago" Google products they never paid for" I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment (bitching about free services feels like entitlement), but Google presents an interesting challenge here because the free services die without even trying or offering a paid version. I wonder what would happen if, instead of just axing services, google started charging.
- NegativeK 14y agoThe news still goes crazy over it. When Google started charging for heavy use of the Maps API, people claimed Google was performing Microsoft-esque anti-competitive tactics.
- mmanfrin 14y agoThe difference there is that Google Maps was used on a majority of all products that featured maps (outside in-house things from Microsoft, or special partnerships). Google Alerts, Reader, Finance, et al are products they have been closing/breaking/disregarding for lack of interest, which is a completely opposite problem from the Maps example.
- eswangren 14y agoWhile I'm not completely unsympathetic, that's what you get for relying too heavily in a third party for your core business needs. Honestly, if google alerts was accounting for 35%-45% of your content as you say, you're doing it wrong. Time to start doing your own legwork.
- newobj 14y agoIs an open letter just a blog post you start with "Dear such-and-such"? Please stop saying open letter. Just delete the "Dear such-and-such" part and remove "An Open Letter to such-and-such" from the title. Now look, it looks just like a normal blog post minus the pretence.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoThe "classical" definition of an open letter is a correspondence from person/entity A to person/entity B, which is published for general viewing rather than mailed. The goal of such things is to demonstrate a point of view, and action on that view, for others. As a form of rhetoric it is reasonably persuasive if done well. So to answer your rhetorical question :-) of "Is an open letter just a blog post you start with 'Dear such-and-such'?", Of course it is, it is a rhetorical argument made in the form of a correspondence. Making such arguments in the form of an essay or allegory are also common.
- michaelwww 14y agoWhat strange knowledge you bring from outside the blogosphere. Where is this "classical" world you speak of? ;-)
- ChuckMcM 14y agolol, I certainly can't vouch for it, others [1] before me have used it to great effect however. [1] http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/benjamin-franklin-publishes-an-open-letter-to-lord-north http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/benjamin-franklin...
- newobj 14y agoI don't think it's much of a rhetorical device because you could replace every "you" with "they" and lose no impact. The rhetorical device is a meta one, in the sense that there was something novel about a public communication at one point, but now all communications are essentially public. Another key difference is that the recipient of the open letter would have presumably read it, whereas in this case, Google, clearly, ain't gone read it, or even know about it.
- gcb0 14y agoI love how every single journalist have lost it. remember when i used to work for a huge newspaper, the Ombudsmen opening op-ed column talked about the journalists never leaving the newsroom anymore, just sitting there regurgitating news from the TV or the internet. and maybe making a couple phone calls.
- ch33zer 14y agoI don't want to read a financial blog if the majority of their content just comes from a google search anyways. I hate when news sites just quote verbatim from a source (or worse, another article) with no extra analysis or anything thrown in. I would far prefer to just read the original and make my own conclusions.
- jamesseattle 14y agoIf you have an OS X or Linux machine just use a cron job to do daily google searches. Certainly less than a page of Python.
- webwanderings 14y agoYahoo has apparently updated its Alert, or they're updating. Their last alert email looked different and updated in design. You can also grab Bing's RSS feed which will update based on the time criteria you define with the keywords. I've been noticing a decline with Google Alerts for a while.
- jpilcher 14y agoAnyone accusing The Financial Brand of "lazy journalism" hasn't spent much time on the site. The Financial Brand uses Google Alerts to find new financial institutions starting out on Facebook. If you are assuming that The Financial Brand simply copy-pastes press releases from Google Alerts, you are way off base. Google Alerts are used to find things like http://thefinancialbrand.com/28070/50-of-the-most-spectacular-website-designs-in-banking/ http://thefinancialbrand.com/28070/50-of-the-most-spectacula... Google Alerts are used to identify banks and credit unions that are undergoing name changes and rebrands. All these are used as first-hand sources for original articles. The site is not an "aggregation" service. Regular readers of The Financial Brand know this. And FYI - I'd pay for the service if that what Google needs. Sincerely, Jeffry Pilcher, Publisher The Financial Brand
- nicholassmith 14y agoNot sure why people are downvoting you for coming and explaining the facts to us.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- forgetcolor 14y agoI've found that google alerts rarely reports new hits on my terms anymore. I know this because I also use their time tools in search to find new hits, and what it finds almost never comes in as an alert anymore. When it does it's often quite old.
- mmuro 14y agoI was never a user of Google Alerts until recently and noticed I rarely get emails. However, performing a search will reveal something completely different. By the time a Google Alert gets to me, I've already seen the site. Google Alerts is largely useless for me.
- SkittlesNTwix 14y agoHow soon until Google Alerts is retired, I wonder.
- bsims 14y agoI know the author of this post and notified him it had made the front page of Hacker News. Thought it was ironic to find out from a person vs. Google Alerts.
- masklinn 14y ago> Google has lost touch with its core business model: search. It's not and it's never been their "core business model", sadly. It's their hook.
- will_brown 14y agoJust wanted to share how I came to use Google Alerts, because out of any software I have ever used it is the strangest introduction. In 2010 I started V-BLOOD, LLC and began distributing a blood red, vampire themed energy drink in small glass dram vials. V-Blood was doing well so I wanted to expand the product line with glass vials full of sour candy called "sour fairy dust". The supplier of the sour candy happened to be the creator of Jelly Belly. As it turned out we both had backgrounds in law and I was lucky enough to gain a mentor for V-Blood. In addition to the million other insights he gave me into the candy/convection industry, he insisted I use Google Alerts for energy drinks, candy, vampires, ect... If Google lets Alerts go to the wayside it is a major opportunity in search for start-ups. Maybe most would disagree but I see Alerts as a stand alone product and not simply a feature for Google.
- ams6110 14y agoSeems to me that with something like curl or lynx, diff, a crontab, and a bit of hacking you could pretty easily come up with a script that periodically ran a search query and emailed you any new results since the last time it ran.
- kamakazizuru 14y agowhy not try presstler if you want to find out about ur brand? http://presstler.com http://presstler.com
- TheShadowFog 14y agolol
- InfinityX0 14y agoSEOmoz's Fresh Web Explorer is a great substitute for Google Alerts, and it was launched partially for this reason. It's not instantaneous, but it allows you many of the same functions as Alerts, with a much bigger spread. Tool: http://freshwebexplorer.seomoz.org http://freshwebexplorer.seomoz.org Post with More Depth On Usage: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/announcing-fresh-web-explorer http://www.seomoz.org/blog/announcing-fresh-web-explorer
- nicholaides 14y ago"Google has lost touch with its core business model: search" Those type of statements always bother me. Google probably knows what their core business model is.
- seangransee 14y agoTheir core business model isn't search. It's advertising.
- anigbrowl 14y ago...on search results. Let's not split hairs.
- teeja 14y agoMy experience with Blogger began after G acquired it, and it never changed (over a few hundred posts) ... just languished, like someone got a new toy and got tired of it. "Embrace, extend, extinguish"? Maybe, or was there no potential profit in it? Reminds me of when Apple let Hypercard stagnate, then assigned someone to overhaul it, then quit that with it half-finished ... just before declaring HC "over".
- rushabh 14y agoAgain anecdotal but Google Alerts is definitely broken. I hope Twitter is sensing a big opportunity here.
- atesti 14y agoI wonder if Google Alerts will even survive until the next spring cleaning
- hknozcan 14y agoI did not realize this either due to extensive email traffic but it makes sense. I took time and added a couple alerts the other day. If it is broken, why have us spend time and rely on it.
- lazylizard 14y agohttp://tattlerapp.com/ http://tattlerapp.com/ does this work?