E-Mail Alerts - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 63

Again, because e-mail alerts don't update you with false-positive content,
they sometimes provide more useful content than RSS feeds provide. (See
Chapter 2 for more information on false positives and RSS feeds.) Another
reason why e-mail alerts can sometimes be more useful is the technology
on your end. You may want to get content update alerts sent somewhere
other than your computer—say, your cell phone. Your cell phone may be
able to receive e-mail, but it may not be able to handle RSS feeds. In this
case, an e-mail alert service is a better choice.
So part of the reason for using e-mail alerts is practical: they're far less likely
to give you false positives, sometimes they're all that's available, and they
can cover an entire site rather than just a page. And part of the reason has
to do with you. Sometimes RSS feeds and monitoring services don't mesh
with the tools you've already got in your toolbox, like a cell phone that can
get e-mail but can't run an RSS feed reader.
Finding E-Mail Alert Services
E-mail alert services exist for just about everything. I use alert services that
let me scan for mentions of companies, ind out about the latest scientiic
research in autism, and check eBay for diferent kinds of inventory. Unfor-
tunately, this topic doesn't have room to discuss all of the e-mail alert ser-
vices available, so we'll start by looking at some search engine strategies
that are useful for inding them, and then proceed to some of the more
useful general e-mail alert services.
To ind e-mail alert services, you can begin by using Google and entering
the simple query “e-mail alerts” or “email alerts” . As of this writing,
Google returned over 117 million results for such a search, so it's not that
useful. It's better to narrow the search by including topics.
For instance, if you're interested in science, you could try science (“e-mail
alerts” OR “email alerts”) . his search produced over 32 million results,
which is still too many. You'll have to get more speciic.
Maybe you're interested in autism, like I am. So you could try autism (“e-mail
alerts” | “email alerts”) , which—when I did the search—returned 62 results.
While that's an improvement, it's still a lot of results, so you could try diferent
combinations of keywords in an efort to narrow your results further.