I see variations of this complaint about Google Alerts all day on Twitter. It is most often expressed as getting alerts on the “wrong” person when doing a vanity search. Sometimes it is the “wrong” company. The recipient knows what they want, so anything else is obviously wrong. Instead of thinking about what you want when creating an alert, try telling Google what you don’t want. The more explicit you are, the fewer irrelevant emails you will receive.
Block multiple word results. The other day someone complained that Google Alerts was delivering results for triple hop when they had a search for triplehop. Google search tends to be fuzzy, which means that they try to give you variations on words, even single words. You can block this delivery of multiple word variations by putting a + sign in front of a word with no spaces. Try these two searches:
triplehop
+triplehop
Add exclusion keywords. This is the best way to get Google Alerts on just the “real” you. I wrote a complete blog post on this, but here is the basic idea. Find words that identify the “wrong” result, and add them to your search with a – sign in front with no spaces. This tells Google not to send alerts that contain this word.
pizza
pizza -dominos
You can add more and more exclusion terms until the irrelevant results drop down to an acceptable level.
pizza -dominos -chicago -party
Block irrelevant sites. If you keep getting alerts from a site that you don’t care about, add it as an exclusion term with the minus sign and site: operator.
book -site:amazon.com
Keep testing in Google Search. Following this procedure in Google Alerts is too frustrating, since you have to wait to see your results. It’s better to test different versions of your search in Google Search until you get it right. Here is an example that shows hard hard you may have to work. What is you need to track mentions of apple, the kind you eat, not the computer products. Here is a search I finally came up with that does a fairly good job of this. Google Alerts allows up to 32 words per search term, so there is still room for more.
apple -macbook -imac -itunes -monitor -ipod -computer -app -pc -microsoft -windows -”steve jobs” -wozniak -phone -iphone -cupertino -site:apple.com
Learn more. I have a free Google Alerts tutorial that can give you even more ideas on perfecting your search terms.
Tagged as:
Google Alerts,
syntax,
Vanity search
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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.
Tagged as:
Ego search,
Google Alerts,
name search,
reputation alerts,
Reputation management,
Vanity search
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