One of the top complaints among Google Alerts users is that they sometimes get alerts for items that have been online for a while. Here is a great example from a Twitter message:
The answer is simple. Google sends out alerts when it first finds an item. There is a misconception that Google is God and knows all at the instant it happens. Unfortunately that isn’t true. Google Alerts is always finding things that are new to it, even well after these pages appeared online. This can happen in several ways. A set of pages may become available to it due to a new link to those pages. Pages can get republished under new URLs. And sometimes it is an internal issue as new sections of Google’s existing index are made available to the Google Alerts code.
Update: I got a great response on Twitter that gives another reason for old alerts. Sploggers are republishing pages.
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