Use of Google News Alerts

[grandpa]

I've been using Google Alert as a source of news information about various topics. A few topics are directly related to my widgets and, I think, might make interesting reading to my visitors. However, it has occured to me to look over the Google TOS, and sure enough I found this phrase

You may not take the results from a Google search and reformat and display them, or mirror the Google home page or results pages on your Web site.

The paragraph ends with

If you want to make commercial use of the Google Services, you must enter into an agreement with Google to do so in advance. Please contact us for more information.

That pretty clearly says to me that I cannot use any Google Alerts on my site, or that in order to do so I need to enter into an agreement. That's agreeable. The "contact us" link in the last sentence is a link to an AdSense overview, which is less than informative about how to arrange an agreement. Meanwhile, I'll kill my new News Page (which I think is pretty dang good) until I can get it approved.

Google Alerts are definitely a good way to receive news information about any subject. Has anyone incorporated these alerts into their site, or am I the lone outlaw?

[grandpa]

I can see where this topic isn't as compelling as 302 redirects or pre-fetching, and I can understand that few would answer this question ..
Has anyone incorporated these alerts into their site

Anyway, a phone call and a form message later, and my page is temporarily back up and running and waiting for a decision from the team. I'm still curious to know if anyone else is making productive use of News Alerts, and how you are accomplishing this if they aren't directly incorporated as is. One obvious answer is to write my own articles based on information I can glean from the news sources. But that misses the point of my objective, which is to provide my visitors access to existing news items related to 'widgets' that they might otherwise not ever see.

[mrMister]

There are plenty of news aggregating services out there which people can use without risking the wrath of Google for breaking their ToS.

[BillyS]

There are plenty of news aggregating services out there which people can use without risking the wrath of Google for breaking their ToS.

Agreed.

[vishalrao]

Hi,

I used to display Google news alerts related to my since quite some time and recently my site got penalized. I however was not aware of Google policies and had a strange premonition that I must remove the alerts from my site. I removed all the alerts and surprisingly my site is steadily gaining it's ranking.

When I read your post and the Google policy on using it's alerts, I thanked my stars for guiding me in the right path.

Vishal

[grandpa]

mrMister, yes there are. The advantage of using the News Alerts is that rather than compiling a bunch of headlines, once can focus the information to a specific keyword. I haven't looked that closely at aggregator services, but I'd guess I can't use them for a specific topic. I do use a service for generalized news... SlashDot, BBS, etc.

I'm still waiting for a decision from G.. if you don't ask they'll never say yes.