E-Mail Alerts - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 69

Yahoo and Google are useful services because they come straight from search
engines. But there are some third party services that are also quite good.
third-party e-mail alert services
hird-party e-mail alert services can ofer greater lexibility and a larger
range of monitored services than some e-mail alert services ailiated with
individual Web sites.
Google Alert
Why, you may wonder, is there a third-party service providing Google
Alerts when Google does it already? he best explanation is that third-party
provider Google Alert (googlealert.com) came irst! Google's own service
came along a bit later. A second reason is that Google Alert ofers both
search options and output options that are a bit diferent from Google's. It's
well worth a look.
Google Alert has a paid version available, but the basic, free version is very
useful. You have to register, of course. Once you've registered, a page dis-
plays with a list of query boxes into which you can put searches that you
want to track in Google's Web index ( Figure 4.5 ).
Figure 4. 5
setting up notiications
with google alert.