But, having watched that list of Alerts for a fairly long time, I am guessing that search and search engine optimization have evolved over time and my list of Alerts and my skill at writing excellent Alerts has not kept up. I will now and then see an Alert mail which consists of a long list of hits where the title of each web page pretty clearly shows that page has little or nothing to do with what I'm monitoring for, instead likely someone has stuffed a few keywords somewhere in the page to get their page to show up in Google searches. I don't know whether limiting my Alerts to Best Results might help overcome this or not.
Having thought about this, I think I see that I need to hone my skills and find an excellent resource which will train me to craft much better Alerts. I think skill at writing excellent Alerts is somewhat different from the skill at writing excellent Google searches. There should be an excellent resource out there somewhere to train people to do this. If there was any way to get good feedback on the quality of an Alert that would be very valuable.
If anyone is aware of something like this then please leave a note here. I had intended to post a question exactly like this to HN, but had not yet done so. Thanks for any assistance.
In this case, it's an old account which doesn't see any outbound email traffic (I do still get inbound messages which I actually want, newsletters and such); I wonder if account activity has an effect on the urgency with which said account's notifications are delivered. The problem otherwise sounds similar except with alerts instead of mail. They also sound dissimilar because you seem to be missing things which you know you shouldn't, even after receiving updates (and it's alerts instead of mail). I would only really consider them as possibly related because of the G commonality.
Just some anecdata in case it's helpful.