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Google News Alerts are sent by email when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify.
Some handy uses of Google News 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
[google.com...]
(this was submitted 12 times within a half hour ;-)
Thats all I have to say! Great news for us news seekers.
I can see the folks at Yahooverture wringing their hands for overlooking this one.
News alert exists in many of the news service.
What Google is doing is integration. It is using its domainance in search engine to integrate other technologies into their service.
The question is : why on earth they want to do the news alert. That is the question. And I think you know the answer already.
[edited by: engine at 4:07 pm (utc) on Aug. 6, 2003]
[edit reason] tidied up formatting [/edit]
News alert exists in many of the news service.
As I previously noted, this was under everybody's nose- variations of a news email service- from newsletters to news section updates can be found at many online newspapers.
The innovation comes from the fact that Google is the first to take their news aggregator and tie the email function to it. Alltheweb, which seems to copy Google in whatever they do, didn't.
Will be adding my alerts soon.
One of their "handy uses"...
keeping current on a competitor or industry
It will be interesting to see if they eventually position themselves to take on LexisNexis ;), and I'm only half joking. 'Mighty oaks' etc....
Sheesh. Yesterday the ~ operator, today alerts.
...tomorrow, improved results! :)
The interesting thing about this is you can specify certain keywords for your alert. Most news sites (at least the ones I go to) only allow you to sign up for themes whether it is "business" "sports" or "US politics" and they will send the top stories or breaking news stories only. Using keywords is smart from Google's business point of view, particularly with the wide variety of news sources that Google News makes available.
I was hoping it would send me the entire article, but it just sends ya a link. :(
Just a thought
Donatus
I'd love to know more about the relationship between news publishers and Google. Is it a free for all if you convince Google you're news service? (I have some competition who claim to be industry specific news sources, and they spam google news with well worded titles - they don't get front page coverage, but they show in the SERPs)
will the news agencies eventually be paying for inclusion?
If I were a major paper, I certainly wouldn't want to be the only major paper not in the index.
That's a hunch I've been considering as well. And for those of us signed up with this news service - it's a news-service's dream come true.
Ahhh, the killer application for new scrapers.Google proves again that they are the leaders in innovation!
It is NOT innovation. News alert exists in many of the news service.
Innovation or not, let's grab it while it's still FREE! (BTW, the NYT began charging for their News Tracker recently) ;)
I can see the folks at Yahooverture wringing their hands for overlooking this one.
Like someone else mentioned other news sources have had similar functionality for some time. In fact, Yahoo has had it since at least November 2002 since I've been receiving news alerts from them since then. Go to [search.news.yahoo.com...] , conduct a search, then see the "NEWS ALERTS" section in the right hand column of the search results page.
In any case, I'm glad Google added this functionality because their beta_for_a_long_time news.google.com site is my favorite news search site and the email notifications will save me quite a bit of time.
[businessweek.com...]
[edited by: netcommr at 8:03 am (utc) on Aug. 7, 2003]
