Google Alerts are simply automated e-mails sent to your Gmail account whenever Google indexes web content - such as web pages, newspaper articles, or blogs - that
match your search term, that match your selected keywords or keyword phrases. This is
a free tool provided by Google. You can choose to include several keywords to
narrow down the search alerts or even put your keywords in “quotes” to even further narrow
down the relevancy.
For example, people use Google Alerts
to:-
- Find out what is being said
about their company or product.
- Monitor a developing news
story.
- Keep up to date information
about a competitor or industry.
- Get the latest news on any
topic which they have interest in.
How to Set Up A Google Alert?
It takes a minute or less to set up a
Google Alert. You just need to follow these basic steps mentioned below :-
2.
Type in the search
query you want to monitor.
3.
Choose what type of
results you want to follow (everything, news, blogs, video, discussions, or
books).
4.
Choose how often
you want to receive updates (as-it-happens, once a day, or once a week).
5.
Choose if you want
“Only the best results” or “All results.”
6.
Choose the email
address you want your alerts sent to, or create a feed.
7.
Click “Create
Alert.”
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Advantages of using Google Alerts :
1)
It saves a lot of searching time as
we don’t have to go through too many articles for finding updates in our areas
of interest. Google Alerts keeps us continuously updated about that topic.
2)
Secondly , we have an option of
getting updates about that topic in the time limit that we want (weekly , daily
, as it happens ).This is also very helpful for people who don’t like too much
of reading(lazy reader’s like me),who prefer to read updates once a week.
3)
Thirdly, there is a provision for
filtering the less important articles.
Demands can also be fulfilled depending on whether we want to see only the
best results or all results.
4)
Even the laziest of people (like me),
who are lazy in searching, get the updates without wanting to search for it.
That’s the most beautiful thing about it.
Thus, we see that there
are many reasons why we must use Google Alerts. It not only saves the most
valuable thing in this world ‘time’, but also reduces the burden of searching.
Those who have started using it are updated regularly. Those who haven’t , must
start using it from now only because the world is changing fast, so you must be
updated enough to be at par with the other people in the world.
