I see variations of this complaint about Google Alerts all day on Twitter. It is most often expressed as getting alerts on the “wrong” person when doing a vanity search. Sometimes it is the “wrong” company. The recipient knows what they want, so anything else is obviously wrong. Instead of thinking about what you want when creating an alert, try telling Google what you don’t want. The more explicit you are, the fewer irrelevant emails you will receive.
Block multiple word results. The other day someone complained that Google Alerts was delivering results for triple hop when they had a search for triplehop. Google search tends to be fuzzy, which means that they try to give you variations on words, even single words. You can block this delivery of multiple word variations by putting a + sign in front of a word with no spaces. Try these two searches:
triplehop
+triplehop
Add exclusion keywords. This is the best way to get Google Alerts on just the “real” you. I wrote a complete blog post on this, but here is the basic idea. Find words that identify the “wrong” result, and add them to your search with a – sign in front with no spaces. This tells Google not to send alerts that contain this word.
pizza
pizza -dominos
You can add more and more exclusion terms until the irrelevant results drop down to an acceptable level.
pizza -dominos -chicago -party
Block irrelevant sites. If you keep getting alerts from a site that you don’t care about, add it as an exclusion term with the minus sign and site: operator.
book -site:amazon.com
Keep testing in Google Search. Following this procedure in Google Alerts is too frustrating, since you have to wait to see your results. It’s better to test different versions of your search in Google Search until you get it right. Here is an example that shows hard hard you may have to work. What is you need to track mentions of apple, the kind you eat, not the computer products. Here is a search I finally came up with that does a fairly good job of this. Google Alerts allows up to 32 words per search term, so there is still room for more.
apple -macbook -imac -itunes -monitor -ipod -computer -app -pc -microsoft -windows -”steve jobs” -wozniak -phone -iphone -cupertino -site:apple.com
Learn more. I have a free Google Alerts tutorial that can give you even more ideas on perfecting your search terms.
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Hi, I’m sure I’m doing something wrong. But even for syntaxes that work perfectly well with google, the google alert is giving more variations.
For example:
+”Persuasive Technology” in google seems to return only pages where we have exact matches.
+”Persuasive Technology” in google alert returns also pages about persuading balblalbalbalbal technologies. Hhmmm. What’s my mistake? I don’t get it (obviously
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