E-Mail Alerts - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 68

he News category monitors the stories made available at Google News
(news.google.com). As of this writing, Google's news search has over 4,500
sources.
he Web category monitors what you'd expect—Google's Web index. As of
this writing, Google's Web index has over 8 billion pages. (Google doesn't
even announce anymore how many pages it has in its index.) So unless
you're very careful and very speciic, you're going to get more search results
here than you know what to do with.
Because it's hard to generate a speciic query, and because it's not clear when
Google indexes (or re-indexes) a page compared to when it's actually cre-
ated, I don't do much monitoring of general Web pages for new additions.
(For this same reason, I wouldn't use the News & Web alert option either.)
If you really want to use it, make sure you use really, really speciic search
terms for things that you might not ind in news stories, like under-the-
radar online services. (I monitor for “online museum” , for example, which
tends to ind personal and new collections that haven't come to the atten-
tion of mainstream media.)
he Groups category monitors Google Groups, which is Google's index
of mailing lists and discussion groups. If you're interested in monitoring
things that might be discussed in groups or lists, such as political situations,
technology hacks, or sotware support, this is an important category. Bear
in mind that discussions are going to be heavy on opinion, and lighter on
veriied facts. Consequently, this is not a reliable source for your medical
research, though it could be useful if you were looking for anecdotal infor-
mation on medical treatment or “support group” type discussions.
Google Alerts provides a few options. You can get updates to your alerts
once a day, as they happen, or once a week. I ind the Once a Day option a
happy medium. If you choose weekly, rather than daily, updates, you some-
times get a lot of information at once—too much to easily process. he As
It Happens option can drown you in mail, especially if your keyword isn't
very speciic.
If you have a Google account, you can sign in to manage your Google alerts,
which has a couple of advantages. It puts all your alerts in one place, and
it lets you specify whether you'll get HTML mails or text mails. If you're
checking your e-mail on a cell phone, you'll probably prefer basic text to
fancy HTML that your cell phone might not be able to handle.