4. E-Mail Alerts

In Chapters 2 and 3, we looked at both new-school ways to monitor for information (RSS feeds) and decidedly old-school ways (Web page monitors). Smack in the middle of those two technologies are e-mail alerts.

An e-mail alert is a service provided by a Web site that sends you an e-mail whenever content on the site matches a topic or keyword in which you have expressed an interest. For example, the Web site PubMed has a service that sends an e-mail whenever new content is published about a particular disease you may be interested in.

This chapter discusses the benefits of e-mail alerts and how to find e-mail alert offerings that are relevant to your interests, as well as provides an overview of some of the more general and popular e-mail alert services. Later chapters explain how you can filter your e-mail to best manage these incoming alerts.

Advantages of E-Mail Alerts

Right now you might be thinking, “So what? Why not just use one of the more advanced Web page monitors when you want to find out when a site matches one of the keywords in which you’re interested?” There are a couple reasons.

First, Web sites offering e-mail alerts don’t update you with false positives. In other words, you’re not going to get an alert about new content on a site unless new content is really there.

Second, most e-mail alert services monitor entire sites, not just pages. If you sign up for an alert from CNN, for instance, you get information about content added throughout CNN’s Web site, rather than only from the front page. There are some Web sites, however, that provide e-mail alerts only when Web content changes, as opposed to when content based on keywords changes. I don’t recommend those. If you only want to be informed when a page changes, a page monitor is a better solution, being more flexible and often more customizable.

OK, so you know when and why you might use e-mail alerts instead of Web page monitors, but what about RSS feeds? Why not use an RSS feed instead of e-mail alerts?

Again, because e-mail alerts don’t update you with false-positive content, they sometimes provide more useful content than RSS feeds provide. (See Chapter 2 for more information on false positives and RSS feeds.) Another reason why e-mail alerts can sometimes be more useful is the technology on your end. You may want to get content update alerts sent somewhere other than your computer—say, your cell phone. Your cell phone may be able to receive e-mail, but it may not be able to handle RSS feeds. In this case, an e-mail alert service is a better choice.

So part of the reason for using e-mail alerts is practical: they’re far less likely to give you false positives, sometimes they’re all that’s available, and they can cover an entire site rather than just a page. And part of the reason has to do with you. Sometimes RSS feeds and monitoring services don’t mesh with the tools you’ve already got in your toolbox, like a cell phone that can get e-mail but can’t run an RSS feed reader.

Finding E-Mail Alert Services

E-mail alert services exist for just about everything. I use alert services that let me scan for mentions of companies, find out about the latest scientific research in autism, and check eBay for different kinds of inventory. Unfortunately, this book doesn’t have room to discuss all of the e-mail alert services available, so we’ll start by looking at some search engine strategies that are useful for finding them, and then proceed to some of the more useful general e-mail alert services.

To find e-mail alert services, you can begin by using Google and entering the simple query "e-mail alerts" or "email alerts". As of this writing, Google returned over 117 million results for such a search, so it’s not that useful. It’s better to narrow the search by including topics.

For instance, if you’re interested in science, you could try science ("e-mail alerts" OR "email alerts"). This search produced over 32 million results, which is still too many. You’ll have to get more specific.

Maybe you’re interested in autism, like I am. So you could try autism ("e-mail alerts"|"email alerts"), which—when I did the search—returned 62 results. While that’s an improvement, it’s still a lot of results, so you could try different combinations of keywords in an effort to narrow your results further.

As you’ve most likely already guessed, finding e-mail alert services via a search engine is challenging. You have to use keywords that are general enough to snag what you’re looking for but specific enough that you don’t get, say, 28 million results.

Take the time to experiment. When you go searching like this, you will find lots of relevant resources that you probably didn’t even know existed, which is good for you and good for your information traps.

Useful E-Mail Alert Services

There are lots of specific e-mail alert services out there that will help you in your quest to monitor the Internet for information, but unfortunately you’ll have to do some mining in Google or another full-text search engine to find them. (Unfortunately since e-mail alerts tend to be features of a site, but not a highlight of the site itself, it’s difficult to find topical e-mail alert services in searchable subject indexes like the Yahoo Directory.) If you’re interested in more general services, we have enough room in this book to look at half-a-dozen of them.

Yahoo Alerts

Yahoo offers many different kinds of alerts, including Amber Alerts for missing children, auctions, weather, and stocks. But the ones that likely will be of most interest to information trappers are news and the breaking news alerts. The other alerts are useful on a day-to-day basis, but unless you’re trapping weather topics, they’re more like the “basic bits of data” discussed in Chapter 1. The news alerts, on the other hand, offer fresh data that you’d want to trap anyway, delivered to you in a timely manner (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1. Yahoo Alerts is constantly adding new types of information to monitor, but for information trapping you’ll likely find the most useful ones are breaking news, news, and possibly feeds and blogs.

To use Yahoo’s alerts (alerts.yahoo.com), you need a Yahoo account (the same kind of account you use to get a My Yahoo portal page, or Yahoo’s RSS feed reader). If you’ve got that, you’re ready to go.

Let’s walk through setting up an alert. Choose, say, Breaking News first, and then the kind of news you want. The second page gives you options (Figure 4.2). Do you want breaking news from the Associated Press or Associated Press bulletins? (Bulletins provide fewer alerts, since they’re more “breaking news” type stories.)

Figure 4.2. Yahoo Alerts offers source and delivery options for breaking news.

You have the option of having the alerts sent to your e-mail address, to Yahoo Messenger, or to a mobile device, such as your cell phone.

If you’re interested in a topic that may precipitate a bulletin, such as politics, international relations, and so on, you may find the breaking news alerts useful. (Be sure to get the bulletins, which will minimize your alerts.) However, if you’re more into old woodworking equipment or treatments for shingles, breaking news may be of minimal interest to you. In cases like these, you’ll want regular news alerts.

When you choose News from the main alerts menu, you’ll discover that you have three types of news alerts available: breaking news (you’ve already seen the options for those), keyword news, or a daily news digest. Go for the keyword news. Again, e-mail alerts are best when you can filter them by keyword. You won’t save much time in your trapping if you’re looking over an entire daily digest’s worth of news.

When choosing keyword-based news alerts, you won’t be able to specify where you want the news to come from, but you will be able to specify what keywords you want included and excluded from your queries.

Once you’ve specified the words, you’re set up to receive alerts. You can go back and add more alerts or review what you already have set up (Figure 4.3).

Figure 4.3. The My Alerts summary tab shows what you’re monitoring and recent matches.

If these alert options aren’t specific enough for you, and you have no objections to RSS feeds, consider Yahoo News RSS feeds instead. They have many more options, including allowing you to search categories of stories and specify the language of stories that you’re searching. We’ll look at more Yahoo options in later chapters.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts (google.com/alerts) offers several different kinds of monitoring—not as many as Yahoo—but it is still a relevant option for many information trappers. Unfortunately, it only delivers via e-mail: there is no option to send alerts to your mobile phone or via an instant-messaging program. Some of the alerts Google Alerts provides include News, Web, News & Web combined, and Groups (Figure 4.4).

Figure 4.4. Google Alert’s options.

The News category monitors the stories made available at Google News (news.google.com). As of this writing, Google’s news search has over 4,500 sources.

The Web category monitors what you’d expect—Google’s Web index. As of this writing, Google’s Web index has over 8 billion pages. (Google doesn’t even announce anymore how many pages it has in its index.) So unless you’re very careful and very specific, you’re going to get more search results here than you know what to do with.

Because it’s hard to generate a specific query, and because it’s not clear when Google indexes (or re-indexes) a page compared to when it’s actually created, I don’t do much monitoring of general Web pages for new additions. (For this same reason, I wouldn’t use the News & Web alert option either.) If you really want to use it, make sure you use really, really specific search terms for things that you might not find in news stories, like under-the-radar online services. (I monitor for "online museum", for example, which tends to find personal and new collections that haven’t come to the attention of mainstream media.)

The Groups category monitors Google Groups, which is Google’s index of mailing lists and discussion groups. If you’re interested in monitoring things that might be discussed in groups or lists, such as political situations, technology hacks, or software support, this is an important category. Bear in mind that discussions are going to be heavy on opinion, and lighter on verified facts. Consequently, this is not a reliable source for your medical research, though it could be useful if you were looking for anecdotal information on medical treatment or “support group” type discussions.

Google Alerts provides a few options. You can get updates to your alerts once a day, as they happen, or once a week. I find the Once a Day option a happy medium. If you choose weekly, rather than daily, updates, you sometimes get a lot of information at once—too much to easily process. The As It Happens option can drown you in mail, especially if your keyword isn’t very specific.

If you have a Google account, you can sign in to manage your Google alerts, which has a couple of advantages. It puts all your alerts in one place, and it lets you specify whether you’ll get HTML mails or text mails. If you’re checking your e-mail on a cell phone, you’ll probably prefer basic text to fancy HTML that your cell phone might not be able to handle.

Yahoo and Google are useful services because they come straight from search engines. But there are some third party services that are also quite good.

Third-party e-mail alert services

Third-party e-mail alert services can offer greater flexibility and a larger range of monitored services than some e-mail alert services affiliated with individual Web sites.

Google Alert

Why, you may wonder, is there a third-party service providing Google Alerts when Google does it already? The best explanation is that third-party provider Google Alert (googlealert.com) came first! Google’s own service came along a bit later. A second reason is that Google Alert offers both search options and output options that are a bit different from Google’s. It’s well worth a look.

Google Alert has a paid version available, but the basic, free version is very useful. You have to register, of course. Once you’ve registered, a page displays with a list of query boxes into which you can put searches that you want to track in Google’s Web index (Figure 4.5).

Figure 4.5. Setting up notifications with Google Alert.

I can hear the cool kids in the back of the room reminding me that earlier in this chapter I said that I don’t do much monitoring of general Web pages for new additions. I did say that. However, the advanced search options make Google Alert worth looking at. Google Alert filters search results and checks them in a way that Google doesn’t.

On the page that lets you create the topics you want to track, you’ll find a More Options button at the bottom of the screen. Click it, and an Advanced Search form appears beside each query box (Figure 4.6).

Figure 4.6. Wow, that’s a lot of additional options!

There are huge numbers of additional options here. You can specify an exact capitalization for Google Alert to search for. (This is handy if, say, you want pages about Windows CE so you want to find WinCE instead of the word wince). You can filter out similar pages. You can even filter out older results. So if you’ve got a search that could use some extra filtering, especially for punctuation and capitalization, I urge you to try Google Alert.

Once you’ve put together your queries, you can specify what results you want to check (from the top 10 to the top 200), and how often you want the results checked (from as frequently as every day to as rarely as every month).

There are four levels of paid services available: a personal service for $4.95 a month, a premium service for $9.95 a month, a professional service for $19.95 a month, and a platinum service at $39.95 a month. But you may find that the basic free service works just fine for you.

TracerLock

TracerLock (tracerlock.com) is a hybrid tool that lets you query search engines and news sources and functions as a Web page monitor, too! It’s not free, but a 30-day free trial is available, which requires you provide a credit card number.

TracerLock is actually several different monitors rolled into one: it monitors news stories, search engines, and Usenet (online discussion groups).

Once you’re logged in to TracerLock, click the “Click here to edit your search terms” link. A form displays where you can list your search terms. On that same page, you also have the option of entering your own news sources that you want monitored for matches on your keyword (Figure 4.7). If your interest is very specialized and most news services are too general for you, this is a great option.

Figure 4.7. TracerLock lets you add custom URLs to its regular database of monitored news sources.

Notice on the front page that you also have the option of monitoring new additions to search engines, as well as Usenet. But you’ll have to enable those. You also have the choice of getting updates for your keywords in real-time or once a day.

In addition to monitoring news, search engines, and Usenet, TracerLock can also monitor Web page changes. Why didn’t I mention this with the other page monitors in the last chapter? Mostly because there’s not much to it. You simply enter the URLs and it sends you updates when the page updates. (TracerLock cautions you to enter only pages that change occasionally; pages that change often, like CNN.com, will trigger alerts only once a day.) It’s okay if you need a backup to the more full-featured monitors covered in the last chapter, but it doesn’t offer enough features (like keyword filtering) to make it a good primary tool.

Pricing varies depending on what you want to monitor. Monitoring a single keyword will cost you $48 a year, while monitoring five terms will cost you $19.50 a month. Over the years, TracerLock has been displaced by alert services provided by the search engines themselves, but I find that it can still locate items in corners and odd places that I wouldn’t have expected.

Not As Cool, But They Work

E-mail alerts may not be as glamorous as RSS feeds, or as technically nifty as directly monitoring the content of a page. But the ability to monitor what kind of data is added to huge indexes like Google’s Web and Yahoo News is a tremendous advantage for the information trapper. Take advantage of it!