
What happened to Google Alerts? - gwern
http://www.gwern.net/Google%20Alerts
======
dangrossman
Google Alerts pretty much only alerts me of news stories. Unless it would show
up in Google News, new links never make it to my e-mail.

For example, a customer posted a nice video review of Improvely on YouTube
today which I can find through Google limiting the date range to today with
the "Search Tools" button. No e-mail from Google, despite the alert set up for
the brand name.

On the other hand, I have one set up for "Surface Pro" and get daily e-mails
when the big tech blogs mention it. Smaller blogs and forums, which are no
doubt talking about Surface often too, never show up in those alerts. The
e-mails even say "News" up top [1].

A few years ago, every mention would trigger an alert. Something did change.
3rd-party apps like Mention [2] alert me more often.

1: [http://i.imgur.com/XeXDUG4.png](http://i.imgur.com/XeXDUG4.png)

2: [https://en.mention.net/](https://en.mention.net/)

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kungfooey
He mentions that they dropped the RSS functionality, but this is not the case
at all. If you edit one of your existing alerts, you can change it to a feed.

Ref:
[http://www.google.com/alerts/manage](http://www.google.com/alerts/manage)

~~~
jrochkind1
Verified.

But the blog post OP cites provides some convincing evidence that they were
gone for at least a moment last July.
[http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/07/google-alerts-
drops...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/07/google-alerts-drops-rss-
feeds.html)

I guess they changed their mind and brought them back? Weird.

~~~
mindcrime
It may have had something to do with the Google Reader shutdown. The reason I
say this, is that I just recently launched an RSSOwl instance, where I had
populated RSSOwl with a list of feeds some time ago... including quite a few
Google Alert RSS feeds. Strangely none of the Google Alerts were working, and
when I started investigating, I found that all of them had a path that
included something like

$BLAH/reader/$BLAH

which suggests that, when those feeds were originally created, the delivery
mechanism somehow involved GReader.

I went back to Google Alerts and re-copied each of the feed URLs and see that
in the new URLs, the path looks like:

$BLAH/alerts/$BLAH

Not definitive, but it hints at some kind of connection.

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stiff
Great article, case studies of skilled hackers solving real problems like this
one are so rare, wish we had more of this. Only comparable thing I can think
of at the moment are Peter Norvig essays:

[http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html](http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html)

[http://norvig.com/sudoku.html](http://norvig.com/sudoku.html)

If anyone can recommend similar things, I won't mind :)

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bashevis
Like others have said, Google alerts only notifies you of news articles.

My company [http://www.Alertification.com](http://www.Alertification.com)
takes a more general approach and alerts you when something on any public
website changes. For example, you'll get an email or text message when an
Amazon price drop occurs, when a college class opens up, or even when concert
tickets go on sale.

~~~
hayksaakian
Pro tip: advertise an alert for when a popular product goes back in stock. (eg
popular electronics)

I made a one off app for the nexus 4 release to account for low inventory, and
got quite a bit of traffic for low/no effort.

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kmf
Worth mentioning that gwern writes some of my favorite things on the web, and
the wealth of information on his site is worth spending time pouring through.
Always nice to see new stuff from him.

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PaulHoule
One thing that I hope people don't miss is that the problem "Google Alerts"
solves is an information retrieval problem that is still unsolved (at least in
the open literature ;-)

Conventional search ranking algorithms give you some score from 1 to 0 and the
only meaning of the score is that a document with a higher number is more
likely to be relevant than a lower number. The results usually are good at the
top and they gradually get worse as you go down. You stop either when you're
satisfied or when it feels like a waste of time.

Suppose, however, you wanted to search scientific papers or news articles
about a topic and see the results ordered in time. All of a sudden the junky
documents that were hidden are visible; the results are embarrassing even for
world-class search engines.

You might say, "let's filter out documents that have a score less than, say,
0.8".

It doesn't work, at least not very well. You run into two problems. Search
engines that crush TREC search evaluations have worse than 70% precision when
the score approaches 1. Also, you'll see plenty of cases that are obviously a
direct hit and the score is 0.5.

The difficulty of the problem is one thing, but the academic approaches people
have taken in IR are another part of the problem. The methods used for most
TREC evaluations are designed NOT to give search engines credit for "knowing
what they know", because to score well on "knowing what you know" you need to
do a super job on easy queries and recognizing they are easy queries, and if
you don't do that, how well you do on hard queries won't shine through.

Another one is the whole idea that you need to normalize scores from 0 to 1.
You don't. A while back I developed a topic similarity scoring system that
just counted the number of common traits things have in common, rather than
using a dot product or K-L divergence or anything like that. It turned out
when the score was 40 you knew the results had to be good because 40 pieces of
evidence is a lot of evidence. If you had 4 pieces of evidence, it was clear
things that were iffy. I might have gotten "better" results in some sense with
a more complex algorithm, but the scores from the simple count were meaningful
-- from my point of view, the better algorithms are stupider because they are
erasing their knowledge about their own confidence.

It's also a big problem in machine learning: often you use the SVM or Bayes or
a neural network and you get some score and if you say the score is greater
than some threshold and it is in the class otherwise it isn't. Because these
algorithms almost always get the wrong idea about the prior distribution, you
often make a "failing" machine learning algo very useful if you do logistic
regression on the output and use that to convert the output into a probability
score.

Anyhow, if you want to learn about this and stop making 'stupid' intelligent
systems, stop what you're doing and read the issue of the IBM Systems journal
about IBM Watson because that's what Watson is all about -- it converts all of
the signals it gets into comparable probability estimates, and then uses
decision theories to take actions that maximize it's utility function. (i.e.
"business value")

~~~
wodow
Thanks for an interesting post.

The IBM journal publication - is it this one?
[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=617771...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=6177717)

~~~
fintler
Although I'm not sure if that's the mentioned publication, you might want to
take a look at [https://uima.apache.org/](https://uima.apache.org/).

More info on how Watson is using UIMA:
[https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/apache_innovation_...](https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/apache_innovation_bolsters_ibm_s)

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TORIG-TG
I've setup a bunch of Google Alerts within the past few weeks, and most of
them have not been triggering when relevant (and very public) content is
published.

~~~
tjeerdnet
I am using Google Alerts for a few months now. I set up a few alerts for
physiotherapy jobs with some keywords like 'job' 'physiotherapy', 'vacancy' et
cetera (in Dutch). But I only get once a month an alert and even then it only
found some sort of news article about the profession, not anything about jobs.
I cannot imagine that so little jobs are put online for this profession.
Twitter search or plain Google search gives me more relevant information.

Not sure about the Google Alert if it is useful at all this way. I can
manually search every day of course, but these are things I thought could be
perfectly automated and done by Google Alert.

~~~
kiosan
I created service that performs predefined search and notify via email if new
results appears. You can search job aggregation websites. the service url is
[http://vertascan.com](http://vertascan.com) email me at sasha vertalab com
and I will help to set up scanner for you.

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dmsinger
I still receive the same alerts I did a few months ago, but now I receive
more. Far more, to the point where some have become useless.

I had alerts like: "This" -"Not that" -site:notnews.com

The filters stopped working for me. I removed and re-added the alerts. Now I'm
pounded with results. They were amazingly effective before.

I can't say I'm surprised, I don't see much of a business model in it, but I
was surprised that it randomly happened to all of my alerts and I haven't seem
a word about a change.

------
hownottowrite
Google Trends appears to be next. They changed the interface under "Explore".
Few featured and works poorly on tablets.

~~~
gwern
If you were curious, my shutdown analysis (
[http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns](http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns)
) estimated Trends had a 52% chance of surviving 5 years (dating from March).

~~~
hownottowrite
I saw your study when it was released. Really excellent work. I suspect Trends
will survive in some form but it has really changed over the last 24 months.
It's becoming far less useful as a research tool, which seems to be Google's
overall trend from transparent->opaque.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
For a while, spammers were using data from Google Trends to find new
phrases/topics to target for autogenerated spam. See
[http://www.stopthehacker.com/2010/04/05/google-trends-for-
se...](http://www.stopthehacker.com/2010/04/05/google-trends-for-seo-
poisoning/) for example.

The new Google Trends UI is still useful for hot topics (Hey, Oracle just won
the America's Cup!), but less useful for spammers.

~~~
hownottowrite
That's unfortunate. It was a really useful tool. The Hot Topics are not
particularly useful, well, unless you want to know what People Magazine is
going to print in their next issue.

------
butler14
Ya it's all but dead these days. Private companies (like Moz with their Fresh
Web Explorer) are trying to fill the gap.

Google certainly look to be actively walling their data off.

See also Google Keyword Tool which has took quite step backwards recently, and
removing organic keyword sources "(not provided)" from Google Analytics.

Bad times for marketers.

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sanxiyn
Today I learned about Change Point Analysis. Thanks!

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ivanbrussik
today I got a Google alert for a Twitter account I created 8 months ago.

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anxiousest
The data seems a bit dated. RSS functionality for example had since been
restored: [http://searchengineland.com/google-quietly-brings-back-
rss-f...](http://searchengineland.com/google-quietly-brings-back-rss-feed-
option-to-google-alerts-171645)

------
calebgilbert
looks for a tl;dr version...

~~~
gwern
Isn't that what the first section is?

"Has Google Alerts been sending fewer results the past few years? Yes.
Responding to rumors of its demise, I investigate the number of results in my
personal Google Alerts notifications 2007-2013, and find no overall trend of
decline until I look at a transition in mid-2011 where the results fall
dramatically. I speculate about the cause and implications for Alerts’s
future."

