

Ask HN: Who uses Google Alerts and what for? - retube

Interested in finding out what the common use cases are for Google Alerts. Seems like a great service, but how much noise is there? Is most stuff relevant, or not?
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daveambrose
Google Alerts has the most effect when it comes to understanding your market
in near real-time, particularly around what your (1) competition is doing and
(2) how you can utilize current trends for your own company's press.

At Scoop St., we use it for looking at some of the bigger companies in the
daily deal and group buying space. I have this set as a daily email digest
that comes in my email late at night - making my inbox more manageable, rather
than an immediate email each time a phrase is mentioned. I get to see what
sources picked up stories on the competition as well as what and why they
wrote about them.

From a press perspective, this is where Google Alerts shines. Most startups
I've spoken with are looking for that "perfect moment" to reach out to press -
most times at the company's launch or some new feature. With Alerts, you get
an inside look where the press is covering stories - particularly around
themes in your industry. More often than not, you can reach out to the
reporter or blogger and introduce your company as it relates to the post they
just wrote about for inclusion in their next piece.

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sahillavingia
I use it to track mentions of my name, my new company, and my products. It's
not nearly as useful as it once was (twitter probably reveals more) but it's
quick and easy to set up and still worth it - especially for tracking down
blog posts from small "indie" blogs.

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jgv
I think most people use them for alerts about themselves or their company.
Noise can be a problem sometimes but there is a good solution/hack for certain
instances. You can set up a google alert to function similar to a google
search. So if you're getting only junk from <http://foobar.com> you could set
up the alert to be as follows:

"your name" -site:"<http://foobar.com> "

This will return matches for "your name" but exclude those alerts from
<http://foobar.com>. Very useful if you're getting a lot of inbox clutter.

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jpmc
I use it to track keywords and link building activities. It is a great way to
get a daily overview of SEO work. The trick is getting your keywords or
phrases refined down to eliminate noise. If you have a generic word like boat
for sale or ebook it just won't work. There is always a little noise but for
me it is still worth sifting through it.

It is also a great way to track your competitors and their link building or
marketing efforts.

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paulsingh
I use it to track the names of friends (so I can send the occasional "Hey,
congrats on XXX") and competitors for a few niche products I've been building.

More lately, I've been using it to keep track of companies I'm advising --
I'll run alerts on key phrases to their industry, the names of their
competitors, etc.

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zacharycohn
I have standing google alerts set up for: -Zac Cohn -Zachary Cohn -parkour
-freerunning

And then various other temporary ones for shorter-term projects.

I used to post news daily to the largest parkour website on the web, and
google alerts were INVALUABLE for finding out about things going on all across
the world and reporting on them. While I was working with that site, we were
THE place for news about parkour, and we almost always had it before anyone
else.

I left the site after some not-so-great experiences with management, and now
the site is lucky to get one update a week on something pretty irrelevant or
out of date. I felt pretty bad leaving, but it almost hurt more to see this
system and resource that I had redesigned, repurposed, and really
revolutionized (in the parkour world) fall to ruin and disuse.

But long story short - google alerts were INVALUABLE. Even though I don't
update the news on that site anymore, I still have this awesome spy-network
that reports back to me.

~~~
zacharycohn
Oh, also "rochester parkour" (city I went to college in). That one was
invaluable for finding people from rochester talking about wanting to learn
parkour. They'd say something, and within 24 hours I'd swoop in and be like
"Hey have you checked out our website? Come to a jam sometime!"

It was pretty cool.

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gwern
Looking at my Google Alerts:

\- 10 Alerts set up for various usernames and family members.

The username ones are strangely sporadic (Google catches _some_ posts to
public mailing lists, and entirely ignores others) but the family member ones
are usually very specific, and hence are rare

\- 11 Alerts set up for topics I maintain webpages on (for example, one Alert
for dual n-back, since I wrote & maintain the DNB FAQ
<http://community.haskell.org/~gwern/static/N-back> FAQ.html), or that I watch
the Wikipedia articles thereof (eg. [[Mark Lombardi]], [[modafinil]], or
[[Frank Herbert]]).

The quality of theses runs an incredible gamut. For example, the Alerts for
[[Neon Genesis Evangelion]] or [[R.A. Lafferty]] are just stuffed with spam
and commercial links, while the Alerts for [[Gene Wolfe]] or [[Nick Bostrom]]
are usually high-quality and actionable.

I don't really have any other uses.

~~~
gwern
FAQ is now at <http://www.gwern.net/N-back%20FAQ.html>

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dangrossman
I wanted to know when a certain office chair sold at Staples goes on sale, so
I set a Google Alert for its name. As soon as a "deal site" mentioned a sale
on that chair I was notified and bought it for $70 off normal price.

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joeld42
I use it to look for blog posts and other mentions of my iPhone app, the
Brainstormer. If someone posts about how cool the web version is, I can email
them and offer them a promo code for the iPhone version. I've got a handful of
reviews that way. Getting mentioned on blogs has been my most successful
marketing technique so far.

Another good strategy is to set alerts for similar, competing products.
Especially if you are a small product competing with a bigger one, you can
send "I noticed you reviewed BLAH, your readers might also be interested in
MYBLAH, which is like BLAH but way betterz!"

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Vindexus
I use it to hear about when people mention the Vagina Game. This normally
happens on blogs and message boards so it's easy for me to swoop in and
comment with a "I made a website for this".

~~~
locopati
Is there an off-the-shelf framework you used to create this kind of
voting/comment/social-flagging system? Did you customize it much (beyond CSS)?

~~~
Vindexus
I built it myself using CodeIgniter.

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solost
I use Google alerts to track news on my clients and their competition. It
seems to work well and I can usually skim through the data pretty quickly. In
my line of work it is critically important that I stay up to date on the
latest news in 1/2 a dozen retail marketing verticals and this is one of the
many ways to do so.

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edkennedy
I have used Google Alerts to keep track of upcoming movies, games, album
releases that have potential for monetization.

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steveklabnik
I have ones set up for "Steve Klabnik", "hackety hack", and "cloudfab". It's a
good way to see if anyone is talking about me, my projects, or my startup. I'd
say that they're almost always relevant. However, I also have one for "ruby
shoes programming", and it often returns irrelevant results. They times that
it does return good ones outweigh the crap, though. It's pretty easy for me to
figure out which ones are important.

Great, now I'm going to get four emails for this post. ;)

~~~
retube
how much time do you spend on them? How easy is it to identify good or bad
commentary? Do you also monitor facebook or twitter?

~~~
zacharycohn
I get daily batches, so every morning I scan through the headlines. If
anything catches my fancy, I'll read it, but otherwise it takes < 10 seconds
to open the email and scan through the headlines.

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angelbob
I have a common-ish name for a prospective new product. No brand built yet,
and I wanted to make sure the phrase wasn't used by somebody else. Google
Alert on the phrase for a couple of months and, yep, nobody else seems to be
using it, so it's safe for me to use.

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shiftb
Hate to admit it, but I set one up for my name about a month ago. So far it's
been extremely relevant, but as far as I can tell there are only a handful of
people in the world with my name anyway.

Vanity is my favorite sin.

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Grantmd
Vanity. It's very relevant for my name -- rarely have a false positive.

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akozlik
I've found it good for tracking coupons. I can set an alert for "Barilla pasta
coupon" and then I get an e-mail when something is found. Helps keep the
grocery cost down.

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pjdavis
I have one setup for my name, cause I'm a narcissist and like to know when
people are talking about me.

edit: misspelled narcissist.

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binarymax
I use it to track press releases from competition.

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oziumjinx
competitors (new pr releases, site mentiones, product releases)

self - different variations of my name

our own company

family members

topics that are relevant to our market and target audience - this is a great
way to find new media outlets to reach out to for exposure

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naner
The only alert I have set up is for "emacs".

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jalada
Tracking my products and competitors.

