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If you are a blogger, who keeps looking for fodder for the next post(s), Google Alerts can bring quite a relief.

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

Google Alerts can help you keep updated with information of interest. All you need to do is create an alert for that information.

Some common uses of Google Alert are

• monitoring a developing news story
• keeping current on a competitor or industry
• tracking medical advances
• getting the latest on a celebrity or sports team
• watching for new videos that match a specific topic
• Link updates.
  

Google Alerts currently offers 6 variations of alerts - ‘News’, ‘Web’, ‘Blogs’, ‘Comprehensive’, ‘Video’ and ‘Groups’.

A ‘News’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.

A ‘Web’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.

A ‘Blogs’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.

A ‘Comprehensive’ alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.

A ‘Video’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.

A ‘Groups’ alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

Lets assume you are a blogger who writes about various events happening in a particular city, for e.g. Bangalore. You would be interested in monitoring latest information floating in the web, you can do so by creating an alert for the same in Google Alerts. Follow the steps below to create an alert for Bangalore Events.

1.) Login to Google Alerts using your Google User Id.

2.) Enter the Search terms for which you wish to create an alert. In our case, enter Bangalore Events.

3.) Select the type of Alert. In our case, we select Comprehensive.

4.) Select How-Often you wish to get the alerts. For out case, we would like to get an alert as soon as the information is available. Select as-it-happens from the drop-down.

5.) Enter the email address where you would like to get the alerts. For our case, enter your mail id.

6.) Press Create Alert.

For further help on Google Alerts, visit the Google Alerts help page.

Personally, I have found Google Alerts very useful. My usage of Google Alerts primarily revolves around Tech news, Links Updates etc. Do share your views on Google Alerts in the comments section.

Also read: How Google Search Really Works

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Vaibhav