An Open Letter to Google: Google Alerts Now Useless
thefinancialbrand.com
thefinancialbrand.com
The site is not an "aggregation" service. Regular readers of The Financial Brand know this.
And FYI - I'd pay for the service if that what Google needs.
Sincerely,
Jeffry Pilcher, Publisher The Financial Brand
Anyways, does anyone have an alternative service they can suggest?
It's near the bottom of the right sidebar.
Intigi gives you the power of Lucene indexed search on the newest articles on the web. You can subscribe to Intigi curated sources, or add your own RSS feeds or Twitter home timeline, and then filter results using powerful Lucene queries (fields, boosting, phrases, slop, wildcards, stop words) and other filters (social signals, word count, publishing date, presence of image or video). Intigi delivers results once per day or once per week via email, or you can view results in realtime through the web interface.
Disclaimers: I'm one of the co-founders and it's a for-pay product.
I think your product looks really cool, but doing a 30 day trial on a product like this doesn't make sense to me. I may not even be able to validate the products usefulness in 30 days.
What I would suggest is that, as a marketing professional, I have a TON of topics I'd like to monitor. Why not let me monitor 1 topic forever and then force me to pay if I want more?
I guess I'm more interested in why this isn't a freemium product. What was the thought process?
The reason we haven't pulled the trigger on this to date is twofold. First, we're a bootstrapped startup and we've been cautious about our burn rate (e.g., scaling infrastructure before we've achieved product/market fit and a sustainable revenue model). Second, for some time our product wasn't fully self-service. We were concerned about the support issues that would come with a significant growth in our user base, especially free users, potentially outside our target market.
We've now progressed beyond these two issues, and will launch a freemium model soon, with 1 or 2 interests and cached results that are updated once or twice per day.
I'd appreciate any other feedback, and happy to answer questions by email at mjfern@intigi.com.
I'll share some details of how we weathered the support issues :).
Basic account is free. I've only been using it for a couple of days, so I can't really comment on how well it works yet.
You can also do RSS aggregation, as each "channel" can consume as many RSS feeds as you want, and then the aggregate of all the entries is itself exposed as an RSS feed.
There's also voting, tagging, a "share" feature that lets you send links via email or XMPP, etc. It also looks a lot like Reddit for some weird reason.... whistles innocently
(There's a new visual theme coming that won't look so obviously inspired by Reddit, BTW)
All of that said, we're not at a 1.0 release yet and while a LOT of stuff works, and someone could almost certainly get value from it, there are definitely bugs and things that don't yet work the way we want them to. In particular the recommendations engine is currently just the Lucene MoreLikeThis filter which is pretty naive. We have plans to roll some much more sophisticated analysis using Mahout[2] eventually, but haven't gotten there yet.
Eventually we'll have persistent searches with alerts via email and XMPP, alerts based on vote thresholds, and a whole raft of other features. It's coming together, just more slowly than we'd like.
If you want to take a look, there's a public demo server at
http://demo.fogbeam.org:8080/neddick1
Sample logins are testuser0-testuser19 with password "secret".
The front-page right now is actually being fed the RSS feed from here at HN, but you'll notice it's a few days out of date. That's one of the bugs I mentioned. There's a bad piece of content coming in on one of the feeds, and it's breaking the parsing, which is currently causing it to break out of the loop that consumes the feed. Fixing that is on my TODO list for Real Soon Now, so hopefully by this weekend.
Edit: This channel is more up to date, and it is, indeed, being populated from a Google Alert. This is getting a bit meta circular now... :-)
http://demo.fogbeam.org:8080/neddick1/r/Microsoft
If you wanted to use this for a more general "entire web" alerting tool, you'd have to build (or acquire) a crawler to go out and get the data. I think there might be some useful stuff in Nutch[3], Droids[4], Manifold[5] and/or Heritrix[6], but I won't swear to it.
That's the bit we're not really interested in, as we aren't trying to build a public, consumer facing app here, but a tool for use inside organizations. Still, if somebody wanted to use it that way, it could be done. Scalability would also be an issue, but I think that could be managed..
[1]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick
[4]: http://incubator.apache.org/droids/
That is to say, I'm not at fault for using a freely offered (and long standing) free service and it is worth noting when the quality of such a service starts to suffer.
Lastly, if you're doing it right, free is not "free of value" to the provider. Google, the search and information company could easily be gleaning something important from what people are using alerts for... and for what they click through on, etc. etc. and, as such, just because it's "free", it doesn't mean I'm not mindful (or entitled to the benefits) of the value I am providing.
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment (bitching about free services feels like entitlement), but Google presents an interesting challenge here because the free services die without even trying or offering a paid version. I wonder what would happen if, instead of just axing services, google started charging.
If a free Google service had either the volume of users or the instensity of use that would make it seem viable as a paid service, it probably would either become a paid service or, if Google had a strategic reason to keep it free, continue as a free service.
A free service that gets axed is almost certainly one that it doesn't appear likely enough to Google that it would be worthwhile as a paid service to justify expending the staff time required to design a pricing structure and integrate billing.
And would-be concurrence dies a quick death as they can't compete with a price of 0 and can't compete with a search index and processing power of essentially infinity.
We do have native clients, but we also have a web and mobile version available. We'll soon be available right from your iPad too.
Sounds like a fun project, actually. Thanks, I'll add it to the queue with side projects!
Years of listening to mindless defenses and personal attacks for pointing out the obvious fact "that they are just as bad as any other company" ...the taste of sycophantic tears warms my jaded heart just a litte ;)
Fewer people would bother posting a blog about a Microsoft product that sucked (or used to be good and now sucked), or a Microsoft decision that was bad for users but good for MS. Or if they did, nobody would pay attention.
But, yeah, agree with you, I'm kind of glad that it's obvious that Google is quite capable of having crappy products or 'doing evil' -- in part it's smug satisfaction, in part it's because it makes them _less dangerous_ if people catch on to the dangers of their near monopolies.
Next I tried mention.net: 4 results not even related to my search, the rest were all overview sites instead of the article. For example it showed a kickstarter category page as recently updated because it had the search term.
I would love to see a free or paid alternative that works.
That said, it sounds interesting anyway so I'll give it a try :)
Drop an email at support@mention.net if you want us to help you.
I dont begrudge websites that use ads, but in this case it really detracted from readability
My original comment was near the top when "jpilcher" showed up (based on his responses, it was roughly 1-2 hours after I saw the article) and I suspect he read the comments and changed that specific page.
Other articles still show the old format: http://thefinancialbrand.com/28313/cool-vehicle-designs-from...
(Notice the size of the ad on the right side as well as the interstitial ads)
The layout didn't attract my attention when I read the piece and posted it here. It felt like a fairly ordinary commercial site...
I use it mainly for alerts about apps and services I develop and it does a good job of alerting me whenever someone mentions it on websites as well as in tweets etc.
We're currently working on the new version and first experience is one of our priority.
The other thing was that after signing up, I was not logged in. Since I already forgot my password (put in some crap) i had to use the reset-password thingy.
I remember, that later I had some problems adding keywords. I dont know why anymore, sorry.
I have to say, that your service is good. Only the ui was annoying.
If Google lets Alerts go to the wayside it is a major opportunity in search for start-ups. Maybe most would disagree but I see Alerts as a stand alone product and not simply a feature for Google.
Or am I missing something?
You can also grab Bing's RSS feed which will update based on the time criteria you define with the keywords.
I've been noticing a decline with Google Alerts for a while.
"Embrace, extend, extinguish"? Maybe, or was there no potential profit in it? Reminds me of when Apple let Hypercard stagnate, then assigned someone to overhaul it, then quit that with it half-finished ... just before declaring HC "over".
Those type of statements always bother me. Google probably knows what their core business model is.
Tool: http://freshwebexplorer.seomoz.org Post with More Depth On Usage: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/announcing-fresh-web-explorer
remember when i used to work for a huge newspaper, the Ombudsmen opening op-ed column talked about the journalists never leaving the newsroom anymore, just sitting there regurgitating news from the TV or the internet. and maybe making a couple phone calls.
Please stop saying open letter. Just delete the "Dear such-and-such" part and remove "An Open Letter to such-and-such" from the title. Now look, it looks just like a normal blog post minus the pretence.
So to answer your rhetorical question :-) of "Is an open letter just a blog post you start with 'Dear such-and-such'?", Of course it is, it is a rhetorical argument made in the form of a correspondence. Making such arguments in the form of an essay or allegory are also common.
[1] http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/benjamin-franklin...
Google Alerts is largely useless for me.
Thought it was ironic to find out from a person vs. Google Alerts.
It's not and it's never been their "core business model", sadly. It's their hook.