Forum Moderators: open
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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...]
Like someone else mentioned other news sources have had similar functionality for some time
For example, the Danish companies Newbooster.com and Visator.dk introduced this service (though not for free) a couple of years ago. They both had to move to other countries (Visator to Singapore, and I think Newbooster went to England, not sure about this, and their website doesn't work - perhaps they don't exist anymore) after the Danish Newspaper Publishers association sued them for "deep linking" without permission. The Court ruled in favor of the newspapers (who by the way have a similar service themselves, that is somewhat similar to Reuters).
Can Google get into legal trouble for this News service?
More about the Newsbooster case:
[webmasterworld.com...]
Limit by country: If you want to set up an alert that will send you a link any time a publication based in New York or Britain runs a story related to Iraq, enter the syntax "iraq location:ny" or "iraq location:uk"
Exact phrase searching: Enclose the phrase in quotes
Search for any of the words listed: Include "or" between the words: "jakarta or bombing"
Exclude words: To search for articles that include "Jakarta" but not "bombing," use the minus sign and enter the phrase: jakarta -bombing
from (poynter.org/column.asp?id=32&aid=43832)
More useful are the handful of RSS-feed Google News scrapers out there that generate a feed for your search terms on the fly. The reason these scrapers are more useful is that your feed reader only shows stuff that's new compared to the last search.
If Google wants to improve Google News, they should install their own RSS feed that generates the RSS file, which in turn is based on the search terms in the URL you've bookmarked in your feed reader.
Someday Google can stick tons of contextual ads in the emails, which go out to a mass market.
Ads in RSS feeds are either harder to do or easier to strip out on the client end with a little filtering, and the market is much smaller because not everyone knows about RSS readers.
Silly me....
