Google Alerts: Stay On Top of Industry News

Keeping a close eye on news in your industry can mean following dozens of blogs, reading a whole stack of magazines and generally spending every waking hour trying to find information. The process is made even more difficult by the fact that you may only be interested in a small portion of industry news: perhaps you work in a particular niche and you don't really need information about the other parts of the industry. You can make sure that you get regular updates on news related to a specific topic through Google Alerts without having to go out and track down new information each day.

Get the News with Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free tool made available by Google. Essentially, Google runs a specific search for you every so often and emails you any new results. You choose the keywords that you want news about, creating multiple alerts if desired. Choosing terms that are very specific will get information more closely related to your topic. For instance, you may work in the advertising industry, but simply setting up an alert for "advertising" will probably bring you more links than you can easily sort through. But terms like "Florida advertising" or "billboard advertising" may bring you the kind of information you're more interested in.

Choosing relevant keywords is the hardest part of setting up an alert. You may need to set up several to make sure that you're getting the right information for your company. You can also create advanced searches to limit the information you get even further, such as adding "site:website.com" to your alert keywords to limit results to one specific website. You can learn more advanced search terms with Google's list of advanced search help.

Narrowing Your Results

You can also narrow down the sorts of results you receive. You can specify that you only want new blog posts, or information from news sites, or videos. But you can also ask Google to send you every new result for a certain keyword, including new websites and other information. In most cases, the information available from Google's news sources, along with blogs, is probably going to be the most useful. However, some useful information can appear in a comprehensive alert, like any changes to the websites of your competitors.

Google Alerts can narrow the information you see related to your industry. You can also speed up the rate at which you receive information: Google Alerts allows you to select how often you receive alerts, including an option to receive emails "as it happens". Considering how quickly the news can change, that sort of immediacy can be very important. And it doesn't hurt that reading the links that make up a Google Alert email can be significantly faster than trying to sort through blog posts and magazine articles on your own.

Beyond Google

There are some parts of the web that Google Alerts cannot provide particularly good information about. Social networking sites, such as Twitter can be harder for Google to track, but you can get an idea of the news about your industry that is currently appearing on such sites with specialized tools. The Twitter website actually offers Twitter Search, which allows you to easily search for keywords on the site. Tools like Twilert will allow you to set up reoccurring alerts for keywords on Twitter, just as you can set up a Google Alert.