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Google Alerts 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: Upper or lower case can break your alerts

by Adam Green on March 10, 2009

in Bugs, Google Alerts, Google search syntax

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 coders fall into, but they do have some weird ideas about case that can break your Google Alerts.

One example is using the word or to separate multiple terms. Google requires you to capitalize it as OR. If you create an alert with or instead, Google will ignore it. The funny thing is that when or is ignored, Google then assumes that you want to and all the words. So a search for pizza OR beer will work and give you alerts for either word, but pizza or beer will only give you alerts where both words are found.

The exact opposite rule applies to special search operators, such as intitle: or site:. These must be in lower case, or else Google will actually search for these words. For example, a search for intitle:pizza will only deliver alerts where pizza is found in the title, but INTITLE:pizza will look for alerts with both the words intitle and pizza anywhere in the page.

The worst part about this for Google Alerts is that when you create an alert there is no warning if you enter something Google doesn’t understand. You just don’t get any alerts, or you get the wrong ones, which is why you should try every alert query as a Google search first.

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