Add this phenomenal power tool to your daily delivery of Google news/update email alerts - then just stand back and watch it fly. Alert Rank immediately goes to work gathering, sorting, and annotating for you.
All you have to do is review the neat, easy-to-read reports as they arrive.
It couldn't be simpler!
The simplest Google Alert is obviously a single word, like new. But if you look closely at the results, you'll see that Google is making a decision that you might not agree with. It is automatically adding an "s" to the end of new, and searching for news as well.
This automatic searching for plural versions of nouns is called stemming, and Google does it with verbs as well. For example, an alert for swim will also get results for swimming. In many cases this is useful, but if you really want to search for a word like new, you may not want results for news. If you search for book, you may not be interested in booking.
You can force Google to search for exactly the word you want by putting a + sign in front of the word. This turns off stemming. Try a search for +new to see the difference in the results.
The New York Times still shows up, but this time the word New was matched, as you can tell from the bold face in the results. Instead of getting mostly news sources, you can now focus in on results for just the word new.
You can go in the opposite direction, and let Google find even more matches for a single word, by telling it to use synomyms in your alerts. This is done by putting a tilde (~) in front of the word. If you try this with ~food, you'll also get alerts for words like recipe, nutrition, restaurant, cuisine, and cooking. Pretty cool.
