E-Mail Alerts - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 72

Figure 4.7
tracerlock lets you
add custom Urls to
its regular database
of monitored news
sources.
Notice on the front page that you also have the option of monitoring new
additions to search engines, as well as Usenet. But you'll have to enable
those. You also have the choice of getting updates for your keywords in
real-time or once a day.
In addition to monitoring news, search engines, and Usenet, TracerLock
can also monitor Web page changes. Why didn't I mention this with the
other page monitors in the last chapter? Mostly because there's not much
to it. You simply enter the URLs and it sends you updates when the page
updates. (TracerLock cautions you to enter only pages that change occa-
sionally; pages that change oten, like CNN.com, will trigger alerts only
once a day.) It's okay if you need a backup to the more full-featured moni-
tors covered in the last chapter, but it doesn't ofer enough features (like
keyword iltering) to make it a good primary tool.
Pricing varies depending on what you want to monitor. Monitoring a single
keyword will cost you $48 a year, while monitoring ive terms will cost you
$19.50 a month. Over the years, TracerLock has been displaced by alert ser-
vices provided by the search engines themselves, but I ind that it can still
locate items in corners and odd places that I wouldn't have expected.
Not As Cool, But They Work
E-mail alerts may not be as glamorous as RSS feeds, or as technically nity
as directly monitoring the content of a page. But the ability to monitor what
kind of data is added to huge indexes like Google's Web and Yahoo News is
a tremendous advantage for the information trapper. Take advantage of it!