Thursday, June 10, 2010

Google Web Alerts No Longer Available

Google will no longer offer alerts for web search results and will replace them with comprehensive alerts that include results from Google Web Search, Google News and Blog Search. Marcel Gordon, Product Manager for Google Alerts, says that web alerts weren't very popular.

"We've decided to retire Web alerts because they are used by very few people and an alert of type Everything will find the same results. This week we'll be changing all alerts of type Web into alerts of type Everything. You may receive more results after this change. If you find that you are getting too many results, you can change the "How often" setting to "once a day" or "once a week." You can also change your search query. You can do this on the alerts management page, or by removing the alert using the link at the bottom of each alert email and creating it again with different settings."

http://felix-googleblog-archive.blogspot.com
Maybe Google should discontinue Google Alerts and provide regular feeds for search results. Right now, you can create feeds for web search results using Google Alerts, but they have URLs that can't be generated automatically. Google News, Blog Search, and Google Video already offer feeds for search results.

No comments:

Post a Comment