From the category archives:

Bugs

What would people like to change in Google Alerts?

by Adam Green on March 13, 2009

in Bugs, Google Alerts, Wish list

While I was collecting data for the Google Alerts user professions I also kept track of their complaints and wish list items.

Top Google Alerts Complaints

Alerts for old pages. The decision process for selecting an item for Google Alerts is a complete mystery, and delivering pages that have been around for a while, or even years, is one of the most mysterious.

Information overload. Google Alerts create their own overload problem, even though they are meant to reduce information clutter. This complaint is related to the wish for better filtering features.

Google Alerts marked as spam in Gmail. This is one of the oddest things we have found in creating AlertRank. We did lots of testing of various email paths, and the only conclusion is that different development teams at Google are at war with each other. If they were collaborating, it would be trivial for the Google Alerts people to provide a unique signal in their mail that the Gmail people could detect.

Top Google Alerts Wishes

Auto-tweeting Google Alerts. There is a lot of chatter about various solutions to deliver Google Alerts directly to a Twitter account, but people are also concerned about the quality of the alerts that just get dumped into your account.

Better filtering. This is related to both information overload in general, and the desire to reduce unwanted results. Another way people ask for this is the desire for better ways to filter out other people’s names, since they are using alerts as an ego search. It’s interesting that a lot of Google Alerts users don’t realize that you can put a first and last name together in quotes to help with that.

Sentiment analysis. I guess what this is supposed to mean is telling whether a mention is positive or negative. I’m a database guy, which means I’m naturally skeptical of AI solutions. I think the best way to measure sentiment is to set up alerts for your product or company name combined with words like hate or love. I’ll try to get out a post with some details on this later today.

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Google Alerts bug: Multiple URLs can’t be searched with site:

by Adam Green on March 12, 2009

in Announcements, Bugs, Google Alerts, Google search syntax

The site: operator is a great part of Google Alerts. It lets you restrict your search term to a single URL:
“steve jobs” health site:nytimes.com

Unfortunately, you can only use site: once per alert. The OR operator usually allows you to combine multiple terms in a single query, but if you use it with site:, only the first URL is searched. Google doesn’t warn you about this. This search will still only create alerts for nytimes.com:
“steve jobs” health (site:nytimes.com OR site:wsj.com)

If you want to use site: with multiple URLs, you have to create separate alerts for each one:
“steve jobs”  health site:nytimes.com
“steve jobs” health site:wsj.com

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Google Alerts Bug: Upper or lower case can break your alerts

March 10, 2009

I’ve always been annoyed by software that makes a distinction between upper and lower case. Other than passwords, there is no reason why a human should care. The only programmers who care are either too anal or too much like a computer to recognize that this is just weird. I’m not sure which group Google’s [...]

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Google Alerts Bug: Multiple locations aren’t allowed for news alerts

March 2, 2009

The Google documentation doesn’t say anything about this, but from my tests multiple uses of location: in a single search doesn’t seem to work. The standard Google syntax would imply that you can search for location:ny OR location:ca, but when this is tested with Google News, it only returns results from the state of New [...]

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