I’ve been reading almost every single tweet about Google Alerts for the last 6 months, and there is one type of comment that I still can’t get to the bottom of. Every once in a while, someone will tweet something like, “Dude, I saw you Google me in my alerts!” Or they’ll say, “I love getting Google Alerts when someone searches for me.” The problem is that there is no way to do this. I’ve checked every source possible, and there is no way to get a Google Alert when someone does a search.
You can see searches that lead to your site in Google Analytics, and you can use several Google Tools to see how often people in general search for specific keywords, but none of these deliver Google Alerts.
The most frustrating part of this phenomenon is that nobody will explain what they mean when I ask how they got a Google Alert for someone searching for them. I ask everyone who says they got this type of alert. All of them reply with a comment like, “I just entered my name in Google Alerts. Don’t you already know how to do that?” That will tell them when people mention them online, but not when their name is entered in a Google search. When I ask why they think the alert was about a search, they never reply.
So I’m left confused and rather frustrated. Do they really think they are getting alerts for searches, when they are actually mentions? Are they just describing them as searches, when they mean mentions? Why do they all answer my first question, but never the second? If anyone has any answers on this, I’d love to hear them.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
What if they are typing thier name into the main Google page and that auto-complete function starts filling in the remainder of thier name, because it’s not thier own personal name that is supplying the “hit” but all of the other same-named people throughout the Google/Internet universe that have been searched for?
I know that this is not a Google Alert, but if someone can’t understand this functionality, do you really think that they know the difference between the Alert e-mail function and the web-page?
This theory emerges from my own past when an ex-gf thought I was getting secret e-mails from some ‘internet slut’ when she saw those banner ads popping up on websites. (You have three messages!! Click Here!!)