Ask HN: Who uses Google Alerts and what for? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Who uses Google Alerts and what for?

21 pointsretube31 comments

Interested in finding out what the common use cases are for Google Alerts. Seems like a great service, but how much noise is there? Is most stuff relevant, or not?

View on HN

Google Alerts has the most effect when it comes to understanding your market in near real-time, particularly around what your (1) competition is doing and (2) how you can utilize current trends for your own company's press.

At Scoop St., we use it for looking at some of the bigger companies in the daily deal and group buying space. I have this set as a daily email digest that comes in my email late at night - making my inbox more manageable, rather than an immediate email each time a phrase is mentioned. I get to see what sources picked up stories on the competition as well as what and why they wrote about them.

From a press perspective, this is where Google Alerts shines. Most startups I've spoken with are looking for that "perfect moment" to reach out to press - most times at the company's launch or some new feature. With Alerts, you get an inside look where the press is covering stories - particularly around themes in your industry. More often than not, you can reach out to the reporter or blogger and introduce your company as it relates to the post they just wrote about for inclusion in their next piece.

I use it to track mentions of my name, my new company, and my products. It's not nearly as useful as it once was (twitter probably reveals more) but it's quick and easy to set up and still worth it - especially for tracking down blog posts from small "indie" blogs.

I think most people use them for alerts about themselves or their company. Noise can be a problem sometimes but there is a good solution/hack for certain instances. You can set up a google alert to function similar to a google search. So if you're getting only junk from http://foobar.com you could set up the alert to be as follows:

"your name" -site:"http://foobar.com "

This will return matches for "your name" but exclude those alerts from http://foobar.com. Very useful if you're getting a lot of inbox clutter.

I use it to track keywords and link building activities. It is a great way to get a daily overview of SEO work. The trick is getting your keywords or phrases refined down to eliminate noise. If you have a generic word like boat for sale or ebook it just won't work. There is always a little noise but for me it is still worth sifting through it.

It is also a great way to track your competitors and their link building or marketing efforts.

I use it to track the names of friends (so I can send the occasional "Hey, congrats on XXX") and competitors for a few niche products I've been building.

More lately, I've been using it to keep track of companies I'm advising -- I'll run alerts on key phrases to their industry, the names of their competitors, etc.

I have standing google alerts set up for: -Zac Cohn -Zachary Cohn -parkour -freerunning

And then various other temporary ones for shorter-term projects.

I used to post news daily to the largest parkour website on the web, and google alerts were INVALUABLE for finding out about things going on all across the world and reporting on them. While I was working with that site, we were THE place for news about parkour, and we almost always had it before anyone else.

I left the site after some not-so-great experiences with management, and now the site is lucky to get one update a week on something pretty irrelevant or out of date. I felt pretty bad leaving, but it almost hurt more to see this system and resource that I had redesigned, repurposed, and really revolutionized (in the parkour world) fall to ruin and disuse.

But long story short - google alerts were INVALUABLE. Even though I don't update the news on that site anymore, I still have this awesome spy-network that reports back to me.

Oh, also "rochester parkour" (city I went to college in). That one was invaluable for finding people from rochester talking about wanting to learn parkour. They'd say something, and within 24 hours I'd swoop in and be like "Hey have you checked out our website? Come to a jam sometime!"

It was pretty cool.

Looking at my Google Alerts:

- 10 Alerts set up for various usernames and family members.

The username ones are strangely sporadic (Google catches some posts to public mailing lists, and entirely ignores others) but the family member ones are usually very specific, and hence are rare

- 11 Alerts set up for topics I maintain webpages on (for example, one Alert for dual n-back, since I wrote & maintain the DNB FAQ http://community.haskell.org/~gwern/static/N-back FAQ.html), or that I watch the Wikipedia articles thereof (eg. [[Mark Lombardi]], [[modafinil]], or [[Frank Herbert]]).

The quality of theses runs an incredible gamut. For example, the Alerts for [[Neon Genesis Evangelion]] or [[R.A. Lafferty]] are just stuffed with spam and commercial links, while the Alerts for [[Gene Wolfe]] or [[Nick Bostrom]] are usually high-quality and actionable.

I don't really have any other uses.

FAQ is now at http://www.gwern.net/N-back%20FAQ.html

I wanted to know when a certain office chair sold at Staples goes on sale, so I set a Google Alert for its name. As soon as a "deal site" mentioned a sale on that chair I was notified and bought it for $70 off normal price.

I use it to look for blog posts and other mentions of my iPhone app, the Brainstormer. If someone posts about how cool the web version is, I can email them and offer them a promo code for the iPhone version. I've got a handful of reviews that way. Getting mentioned on blogs has been my most successful marketing technique so far.

Another good strategy is to set alerts for similar, competing products. Especially if you are a small product competing with a bigger one, you can send "I noticed you reviewed BLAH, your readers might also be interested in MYBLAH, which is like BLAH but way betterz!"

I use it to hear about when people mention the Vagina Game. This normally happens on blogs and message boards so it's easy for me to swoop in and comment with a "I made a website for this".

vaginagame.com ? Genius.

Is there an off-the-shelf framework you used to create this kind of voting/comment/social-flagging system? Did you customize it much (beyond CSS)?

I built it myself using CodeIgniter.

I use Google alerts to track news on my clients and their competition. It seems to work well and I can usually skim through the data pretty quickly. In my line of work it is critically important that I stay up to date on the latest news in 1/2 a dozen retail marketing verticals and this is one of the many ways to do so.

I have used Google Alerts to keep track of upcoming movies, games, album releases that have potential for monetization.

I have ones set up for "Steve Klabnik", "hackety hack", and "cloudfab". It's a good way to see if anyone is talking about me, my projects, or my startup. I'd say that they're almost always relevant. However, I also have one for "ruby shoes programming", and it often returns irrelevant results. They times that it does return good ones outweigh the crap, though. It's pretty easy for me to figure out which ones are important.

Great, now I'm going to get four emails for this post. ;)

this is a nice test of the service :)

how much time do you spend on them? How easy is it to identify good or bad commentary? Do you also monitor facebook or twitter?

Emails go straight to my phone, so I don't know exactly how much time, really. A few seconds two or three times a day, at best. I'm not _that_ popular.

> How easy is it to identify good or bad commentary?

Very easy. With my "ruby shoes" query, programming and nikes are easy enough to tell apart that it only takes a glance, really. I could see how this would be different if it was more ambiguous, though.

> Do you also monitor facebook or twitter?

Not really Facebook. I have @steveklabnik, @hacketyhack, and @cloudfab up in Tweetie all the time, with searches set too. So it notifies me if something comes up.

I get daily batches, so every morning I scan through the headlines. If anything catches my fancy, I'll read it, but otherwise it takes < 10 seconds to open the email and scan through the headlines.

I have a common-ish name for a prospective new product. No brand built yet, and I wanted to make sure the phrase wasn't used by somebody else. Google Alert on the phrase for a couple of months and, yep, nobody else seems to be using it, so it's safe for me to use.

Hate to admit it, but I set one up for my name about a month ago. So far it's been extremely relevant, but as far as I can tell there are only a handful of people in the world with my name anyway.

Vanity is my favorite sin.

Vanity. It's very relevant for my name -- rarely have a false positive.

I've found it good for tracking coupons. I can set an alert for "Barilla pasta coupon" and then I get an e-mail when something is found. Helps keep the grocery cost down.

I have one setup for my name, cause I'm a narcissist and like to know when people are talking about me.

edit: misspelled narcissist.

I use it to track press releases from competition.

competitors (new pr releases, site mentiones, product releases)

self - different variations of my name

our own company

family members

topics that are relevant to our market and target audience - this is a great way to find new media outlets to reach out to for exposure

The only alert I have set up is for "emacs".

Tracking my products and competitors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com