This isn't so much an informative news article as it is an advertisement.
Just wanted to share a good alternative to Google Alerts as more and more people are complaining about it.
It's usually best to be honest about your intentions -- the title makes it sound like an investigative piece, or at least a digression on the state of the service, while the piece itself really is nothing but a "buy me" write-up.
In essence, you pulled a good old fashioned bait & switch.
One of the things I like about Google Alerts is that you can get an RSS feed on them - writing software that parses RSS is easy, writing software that parses HTML emails not so much.
As far as I can tell, this solution doesn't offer any kind of programatic access to the alerts, which is really a shame.
For those interested is an honest discussion about the state of Google Alerts, I found this article to be very informative: