E-Mail Alerts - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 64

As you've most likely already guessed, inding e-mail alert services via a
search engine is challenging. You have to use keywords that are general
enough to snag what you're looking for but speciic enough that you don't
get, say, 28 million results.
Take the time to experiment. When you go searching like this, you will ind
lots of relevant resources that you probably didn't even know existed, which
is good for you and good for your information traps.
Useful E-Mail Alert Services
here are lots of speciic e-mail alert services out there that will help you in
your quest to monitor the Internet for information, but unfortunately you'll
have to do some mining in Google or another full-text search engine to ind
them. (Unfortunately since e-mail alerts tend to be features of a site, but not
a highlight of the site itself, it's diicult to ind topical e-mail alert services
in searchable subject indexes like the Yahoo Directory.) If you're interested
in more general services, we have enough room in this topic to look at half-
a-dozen of them.
Yahoo alerts
Yahoo ofers many diferent kinds of alerts, including Amber Alerts for
missing children, auctions, weather, and stocks. But the ones that likely will
be of most interest to information trappers are news and the breaking news
alerts. he other alerts are useful on a day-to-day basis, but unless you're
trapping weather topics, they're more like the “basic bits of data” discussed
in Chapter 1. he news alerts, on the other hand, ofer fresh data that you'd
want to trap anyway, delivered to you in a timely manner ( Figure 4.1 ).
To use Yahoo's alerts (alerts.yahoo.com), you need a Yahoo account (the
same kind of account you use to get a My Yahoo portal page, or Yahoo's RSS
feed reader). If you've got that, you're ready to go.
Let's walk through setting up an alert. Choose, say, Breaking News irst, and
then the kind of news you want. he second page gives you options ( Figure
4.2 ). Do you want breaking news from the Associated Press or Associated
Press bulletins? (Bulletins provide fewer alerts, since they're more “break-
ing news” type stories.)