One of the most common complaints I get about Google Alerts is that it delivers alerts on the wrong person in a vanity feed. Actually, calling it a vanity feed is too dismissive. Everyone should run a Google alert for their own name, just to keep track of the type of information Google is likely to deliver to searchers. There is a standard procedure you can follow that will limit the flow as much as possible to just the real you.
To demonstrate this I’ll use John Smith, the most common name in the English language. That’s not a conjecture. I just asked Google, and it agreed. The specific John Smith we’ll try to create an alert for is John R. Smith, who works for IBM.
You should always use Google Web Search first to narrow down your Google Alerts query. This is the best way to build up a complex query. You can test different variations, and then use the best one with Google Alerts.
Let’s start with just john smith. This gives me 72,000,000 results. I wouldn’t want to run a Google alert for that.
But Google has already told me that John is the most popular first name, and Smith is the most popular last name. We are looking for both of them, so after Google is done with the John Smiths, it will give us answers with these names in any place in the page, even when they are not next to each other.
The simplest thing you can do to narrow down a name search is to put the entire name in quotes. That will only find that exact phrase. Searching for “john smith” gives me just 5,130,00 results, a significant improvement.
The next step is to remove words that are commonly used to refer to the wrong person with your name. In John Smith’s case, it is obviously Captain. To tell Google to never include a result with a particular word, you put a minus sign in front of it, without any spaces in between. A search for “john smith” -captain, brings the total down to 3,870,000. Not as big a change as we might hope for. I guess there really are a lot of other John Smiths.
It’s clear we’ll have to be even more specific, so we’ll use some more identifying information. Our John Smith works at IBM, so we’ll add that. This has the possible problem of excluding mentions of John that don’t have his place of work, but when faced with a chance of thousands of worthless alerts, it seems worth that risk. We can also drop the -captain, since that John Smith never worked for IBM. Trying “john smith” ibm gives us just 74,000 results, a huge improvement. We’ve made our query 1,000 times more accurate.
But that’s not good enough. There could be other John Smiths at IBM. Who are we kidding? There are probably a lot of them. Looking through the results, it seems that John Smith in IBM’s finance division is a pretty popular online also, but it’s easy enough to block him by using -finance in our query. Now with “john smith” ibm -finance we have cut our results down to 57,300.
At this point it is a judgment call as to whether we get even more specific. We could use “john r smith” ibm -finance, which brings the total to 3,650, but what about all the mentions that don’t include John’s middle initial? Personally, I’d go without the middle initial at first, and only add it if the flow was just too high.
So there you have a pretty clear procedure for using Google Alerts for a name search. You start with the name in quotes, and then add words with and without minus signs as needed until you get the specificity you want.
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