How to Use Google Alerts

Google Alerts is free and can be used to track very specific information about any topic on the Web.

The webpage address is:

http://www.google.com.au/alerts?hl=en

According to Google themselves:

"Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

• monitoring a developing news story

• keeping current on a competitor or industry

• getting the latest on a celebrity or event

• keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams"

A musician friend put me onto Google Alerts. He uses Alerts to find the names of his songs appearing on websites. He then finds out if these sites are supplying illegal downloads of his music, and takes action accordingly.

We can create an alert by filling out this very simple form on the Google Alerts page:



If you already have a Google Account for Gmail, Blogger, Analytics, etc then you can sign into Alerts using this same email address and password. We can then modify alerts later on when we need to.

Our aim in using Google Alerts here at Passy World is to try find out what websites are linking to information that is on "Passy's World of ICT". Also we have setup Google Alerts on the name of "Big Passy" and on our other website "Passy World", to see what sites are referencing these, or using information from our websites on their sites.

We should also be able to find out what sites are linking to any of our materials.

The specific alerts we have set up for Google to find for us are these terms:

"www.passyworld.com"

"passyworldofict.blogspot.com"

"Big Passy Wasabi"

"Big Passy"

"Passy's World of ICT"

"Passy World"

It is so easy to set up Alerts on the Google page, that we do not need to explain anything, other than to show you this:



Note that when setting up Alerts, it is very important to include the quotes.
Including quotes ensures that the whole term is checked for by Google.

Eg. For "Big Passy" we don't want Google to alert us to every new page on the web that has either the word "Big" or the word "Passy" in it.... the result of this would be way too BIG!


It certainly did not take time for results from Google to start rolling in.

Here is a typical Alert email from Google that we have received recently:



When we clicked the blue link supplied in the email, it took us to a website called "http://www.edocfind.com".

This site has thousands of PDF and other docs on lots of topics that have been harvested from the web and now have links supplied to them. So it is basically a site that contains thousands of links to docs that are on the worldwide web. It also has its own engine for searching to find docs on a given topic.

Eg. The edocfind search easily found and supplied links to plenty of downloadable documents when we typed in: "Guitar Power Chords".


We promise to try to stay alert, and we will let you know in future Blog Posts if Google alerts us to anything else really interesting.

FINALLY, LET US ALERT YOU TO OUR ONE CLICK SURVEY AT THE TOP RIGHT HAND CORNER OF THIS WEB PAGE. JUST CLICK ONE OPTION IN, AND THEN CLICK THE "VOTE" BUTTON.

Enjoy,
Big Passy Wasabi