An Open Letter to Google: Google Alerts Now Useless

http://thefinancialbrand.com/28346/google-alerts-broken/

by scholia • 13 years ago

191 93 13 years ago

I have a dozen or so Google alerts in my set of RSS feeds (that I've just moved over[0] to Newsblur). I haven't noticed any major degradation, but I haven't tried to test the system. Can anyone suggest an alternative?

[0]http://lee-phillips.org/newsblurred/

cleverjake• 13 years ago

I haven't noticed an issue myself, though I would be interested in hearing the average quality of each item over time (ie if the fewer items you are getting are the cream of the crop of the formerly larger amount).

earbitscom• 13 years ago

I absolutely get fewer of these. I would blame it on getting less press about our company, but they used to alert me when we posted new blog posts on our own company blog, and I never receive those anymore. I can confirm that Google Alerts we used to receive have stopped coming.

eli2• 13 years ago

Uh, those alerts appear to be set to find "Only the best results" rather than "All Results". So, yeah, you're getting fewer of them.

Or am I missing something?

gwern3• 13 years ago

I have a variety of Alerts set to both Best and All. Both have seen substantial falls in hits over the years. (And really, did you think no one would've pointed this out yet if that were the real cause?)

eli2• 13 years ago

Well, every alert shown in the screenshots is set that way.

arafalov• 13 years ago

So, is there a good comparable service? I know there is a bunch of social-media trackers, but Google Alerts (used to) search everything.

josh26003• 13 years ago

I have to say anecdotally that I have noticed my voluminous alerts reporting much less data. When we got TechCrunched I got a hit, but a piece in Gigaom took 4 days to hit my Google Alert. That's a fairly large web property with a good PageRank, so I'm not sure why it would take so long.

Anyways, does anyone have an alternative service they can suggest?

mkr-hn2• 13 years ago

I don't know if it's any good, but Bing has a news alert thing: http://www.bing.com/news

It's near the bottom of the right sidebar.

kanzure• 13 years ago

Does this do only news alerts, or is it also web searches?

gwern3• 13 years ago

Looks like it's new only, and a very small sample of the web. (For example, I searched one of my existing Alerts, "Hideaki Anno interview", and it turned up nothing at all but one page on my site. Even though I have at least two pages which should match...)

jhund• 13 years ago

I'd like to recommend https://intigi.com as an alternative to Google Alerts. I'm one of the co-founders. We started building Intigi 2 years ago because we were frustrated with the limited query abilities of Google Alerts. Intigi is currently positioned for Marketers, however it's incredibly useful for anybody who wants to track online information:

Intigi gives you the power of Lucene indexed search on the newest articles on the web. You can subscribe to Intigi curated sources, or add your own RSS feeds or Twitter home timeline, and then filter results using powerful Lucene queries (fields, boosting, phrases, slop, wildcards, stop words) and other filters (social signals, word count, publishing date, presence of image or video). Intigi delivers results once per day or once per week via email, or you can view results in realtime through the web interface.

Disclaimers: I'm one of the co-founders and it's a for-pay product.

josh26003• 13 years ago

Can I make a suggestion?

I think your product looks really cool, but doing a 30 day trial on a product like this doesn't make sense to me. I may not even be able to validate the products usefulness in 30 days.

What I would suggest is that, as a marketing professional, I have a TON of topics I'd like to monitor. Why not let me monitor 1 topic forever and then force me to pay if I want more?

I guess I'm more interested in why this isn't a freemium product. What was the thought process?

austingunter• 13 years ago

Intigi user. Big huge "less than three" at those guys. Use the product.

Bill_Dimm2• 13 years ago

https://en.mention.net/

Basic account is free. I've only been using it for a couple of days, so I can't really comment on how well it works yet.

Bill_Dimm2• 13 years ago

Mention.net just notified me about a blog post published yesterday mentioning our product. Nothing from Google Alerts lately.

mindcrime• 13 years ago

If you're interested in a little bit of a "roll your own" thing, we have an Open Source project called Neddick[1] that could help. It's heavily centered on RSS feeds and our real target for it is inter-enterprise use... but the RSS feeds can come from anywhere (even Google Alerts, which is actually something we use quite a bit of for our "dogfood" server). Everything is indexed and searchable using Lucene, and there's a feature for adding comments, as well as a recommender to suggest similar pieces of content.

You can also do RSS aggregation, as each "channel" can consume as many RSS feeds as you want, and then the aggregate of all the entries is itself exposed as an RSS feed.

There's also voting, tagging, a "share" feature that lets you send links via email or XMPP, etc. It also looks a lot like Reddit for some weird reason.... whistles innocently

(There's a new visual theme coming that won't look so obviously inspired by Reddit, BTW)

All of that said, we're not at a 1.0 release yet and while a LOT of stuff works, and someone could almost certainly get value from it, there are definitely bugs and things that don't yet work the way we want them to. In particular the recommendations engine is currently just the Lucene MoreLikeThis filter which is pretty naive. We have plans to roll some much more sophisticated analysis using Mahout[2] eventually, but haven't gotten there yet.

Eventually we'll have persistent searches with alerts via email and XMPP, alerts based on vote thresholds, and a whole raft of other features. It's coming together, just more slowly than we'd like.

If you want to take a look, there's a public demo server at

http://demo.fogbeam.org:8080/neddick1

Sample logins are testuser0-testuser19 with password "secret".

The front-page right now is actually being fed the RSS feed from here at HN, but you'll notice it's a few days out of date. That's one of the bugs I mentioned. There's a bad piece of content coming in on one of the feeds, and it's breaking the parsing, which is currently causing it to break out of the loop that consumes the feed. Fixing that is on my TODO list for Real Soon Now, so hopefully by this weekend.

Edit: This channel is more up to date, and it is, indeed, being populated from a Google Alert. This is getting a bit meta circular now... :-)

http://demo.fogbeam.org:8080/neddick1/r/Microsoft

If you wanted to use this for a more general "entire web" alerting tool, you'd have to build (or acquire) a crawler to go out and get the data. I think there might be some useful stuff in Nutch[3], Droids[4], Manifold[5] and/or Heritrix[6], but I won't swear to it.

That's the bit we're not really interested in, as we aren't trying to build a public, consumer facing app here, but a tool for use inside organizations. Still, if somebody wanted to use it that way, it could be done. Scalability would also be an issue, but I think that could be managed..

[1] https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick

[2] http://mahout.apache.org

[3] http://nutch.apache.org

[4] http://incubator.apache.org/droids/

[5] http://manifoldcf.apache.org/

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritrix

cmorgan8506• 13 years ago

I built http://www.feed-alert.com for my own uses. Would consider building on it, if it grabs any notice.

rocky1138• 13 years ago

Haven't had a chance to fully test it out, but I love the interface. Never change.

jimiHendrix• 13 years ago

Please offer something, _anything_, before I have to sign up with my email.

niggler4• 13 years ago

While the essence of the message is fair, there are just way too many ads and moving parts on the page to read it. I could have mistaked it for forbes.com (to be fair, though, they don't have a big fullpage ad before the content)

I dont begrudge websites that use ads, but in this case it really detracted from readability

scholia2• 13 years ago

Really? This is how it looks on my PC, in Google Chrome.... http://imgur.com/NIQb4rU

niggler4• 13 years ago

They changed that specific article's rendering. When I and others looked earlier today, it was a real mess.

My original comment was near the top when "jpilcher" showed up (based on his responses, it was roughly 1-2 hours after I saw the article) and I suspect he read the comments and changed that specific page.

Other articles still show the old format: http://thefinancialbrand.com/28313/cool-vehicle-designs-from...

(Notice the size of the ad on the right side as well as the interstitial ads)

http://i.imgur.com/RekSTWf.jpg

nhebb• 13 years ago

That's weird. I'm getting a page with animated gif's on the right side that make the page unreadable. If I had epilepsy, there's a good chance that I'd be walking down the street naked right now.

aqrashik• 13 years ago

I started using mention (https://en.mention.net/) which I came across on HN itself and I must say I'm really satisfied with it.

I use it mainly for alerts about apps and services I develop and it does a good job of alerting me whenever someone mentions it on websites as well as in tweets etc.

itry2• 13 years ago

Perfect example of a horror ui. It took me so long just to set up a simple alert, that now I hate mention.

welcometothesky3• 13 years ago

I'm co-founder and lead designer at mention. I'll be glad to hear you tell us more about your experience. Can you send us an email at support@mention.net?

We're currently working on the new version and first experience is one of our priority.

davidjgraph• 13 years ago

Anyone else getting bored of people whining about Google products they never paid for when there are alternatives, both free and pay-for?

incongruity• 13 years ago

I use google alerts. I'd pay (a little bit) for it, if I could keep the quality up.

That is to say, I'm not at fault for using a freely offered (and long standing) free service and it is worth noting when the quality of such a service starts to suffer.

Lastly, if you're doing it right, free is not "free of value" to the provider. Google, the search and information company could easily be gleaning something important from what people are using alerts for... and for what they click through on, etc. etc. and, as such, just because it's "free", it doesn't mean I'm not mindful (or entitled to the benefits) of the value I am providing.

niggler4• 13 years ago

" Google products they never paid for"

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment (bitching about free services feels like entitlement), but Google presents an interesting challenge here because the free services die without even trying or offering a paid version. I wonder what would happen if, instead of just axing services, google started charging.

NegativeK• 13 years ago

The news still goes crazy over it. When Google started charging for heavy use of the Maps API, people claimed Google was performing Microsoft-esque anti-competitive tactics.

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

> but Google presents an interesting challenge here because the free services die without even trying or offering a paid version. I wonder what would happen if, instead of just axing services, google started charging.

If a free Google service had either the volume of users or the instensity of use that would make it seem viable as a paid service, it probably would either become a paid service or, if Google had a strategic reason to keep it free, continue as a free service.

A free service that gets axed is almost certainly one that it doesn't appear likely enough to Google that it would be worthwhile as a paid service to justify expending the staff time required to design a pricing structure and integrate billing.

mtgx• 13 years ago

Well then people would just complain about "luring them in" with a free service and then charging them for it (5 years later).

masklinn2• 13 years ago

> Google presents an interesting challenge here because the free services die without even trying or offering a paid version

And would-be concurrence dies a quick death as they can't compete with a price of 0 and can't compete with a search index and processing power of essentially infinity.

polskibus• 13 years ago

You do pay for it with data on your behaviour, when watching and perhaps clicking the ads ,etc. Nothing's free. Starting to charge for something out of the blue generates a lot of negative feedback. There was a good case for this with Red Cross and doughnuts on HN recently.

itafroma• 13 years ago

What alternatives to Google Alerts are there? The only one I knew of that came close to it was Backtype, but they were acquired and shut down a couple of years ago.

kayge• 13 years ago

There was an alternative called Mention[1] that made the front page[2] of HN a few days ago, I have no idea how it compares in terms of features/quality/etc though:

[1]https://en.mention.net/

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5376180

yesimahuman• 13 years ago

Newsle.com is one for people-related alerts. Grabs your LinkedIn and just gives you news on people in your network.

ht_th• 13 years ago

You could roll your own, I suppose. Start building an index and feed it search results on a regular basis. I shouldn't be too much of a problem to hack something together with SQLite3, CRON, and your favorite scripting language.

Sounds like a fun project, actually. Thanks, I'll add it to the queue with side projects!

rjd• 13 years ago

Not at all, in fact I have a smug satisfaction each time I read stuff these days.

Years of listening to mindless defenses and personal attacks for pointing out the obvious fact "that they are just as bad as any other company" ...the taste of sycophantic tears warms my jaded heart just a litte ;)

jrochkind1• 13 years ago

it's in fact precisely becuase Google got such a reputation for technical excellence and 'doing the right thing' that people feel so betrayed when google's products suck, or they act in their own business interest and against their users interests.

Fewer people would bother posting a blog about a Microsoft product that sucked (or used to be good and now sucked), or a Microsoft decision that was bad for users but good for MS. Or if they did, nobody would pay attention.

But, yeah, agree with you, I'm kind of glad that it's obvious that Google is quite capable of having crappy products or 'doing evil' -- in part it's smug satisfaction, in part it's because it makes them _less dangerous_ if people catch on to the dangers of their near monopolies.

Semaphor2• 13 years ago

So I tried bing.com/news: One result. Even google alerts is providing more.

Next I tried mention.net: 4 results not even related to my search, the rest were all overview sites instead of the article. For example it showed a kickstarter category page as recently updated because it had the search term.

I would love to see a free or paid alternative that works.

kamakazizuru3• 13 years ago

try presstler - we´re coming out of beta super soon - and this seems to be the perfect time! ;)

welcometothesky3• 13 years ago

I'm co-founder at mention. As we browse way more sources than Google does, you need to train the anti-noise technology a bit. After a few days, you should be all set!

Drop an email at support@mention.net if you want us to help you.

bitcrusher• 13 years ago

Aren't we "paying" them by 'being the product'? That's the faustian bargin, I believe. You let me use your tool, I let you profile the hell out of me...

reeses• 13 years ago

You have a good point. I suspect, as sources of profiling data, Reader, Alerts, Wave, Buzz, etc. were not producing at the level of search and mail. Plus is to be seen, but it's already descending below the level of discourse on Facebook. (https://plus.google.com/+AstronomyPictureOfTheDay/posts – I guess that's the problem with integrating it with a bunch of cheap smartphones)

smackfu• 13 years ago

No, I like hearing which Google products used to be good but suck now. If no one "whined" about it, how would you know which ones to avoid? Very odd complaint.

newobj2• 13 years ago

Is an open letter just a blog post you start with "Dear such-and-such"?

Please stop saying open letter. Just delete the "Dear such-and-such" part and remove "An Open Letter to such-and-such" from the title. Now look, it looks just like a normal blog post minus the pretence.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

The "classical" definition of an open letter is a correspondence from person/entity A to person/entity B, which is published for general viewing rather than mailed. The goal of such things is to demonstrate a point of view, and action on that view, for others. As a form of rhetoric it is reasonably persuasive if done well.

So to answer your rhetorical question :-) of "Is an open letter just a blog post you start with 'Dear such-and-such'?", Of course it is, it is a rhetorical argument made in the form of a correspondence. Making such arguments in the form of an essay or allegory are also common.

michaelwww• 13 years ago

What strange knowledge you bring from outside the blogosphere. Where is this "classical" world you speak of? ;-)

newobj2• 13 years ago

I don't think it's much of a rhetorical device because you could replace every "you" with "they" and lose no impact. The rhetorical device is a meta one, in the sense that there was something novel about a public communication at one point, but now all communications are essentially public. Another key difference is that the recipient of the open letter would have presumably read it, whereas in this case, Google, clearly, ain't gone read it, or even know about it.

gcb0• 13 years ago

I love how every single journalist have lost it.

remember when i used to work for a huge newspaper, the Ombudsmen opening op-ed column talked about the journalists never leaving the newsroom anymore, just sitting there regurgitating news from the TV or the internet. and maybe making a couple phone calls.

sour-taste• 13 years ago

I don't want to read a financial blog if the majority of their content just comes from a google search anyways. I hate when news sites just quote verbatim from a source (or worse, another article) with no extra analysis or anything thrown in. I would far prefer to just read the original and make my own conclusions.

jamesseattle• 13 years ago

If you have an OS X or Linux machine just use a cron job to do daily google searches. Certainly less than a page of Python.

webwanderings• 13 years ago

Yahoo has apparently updated its Alert, or they're updating. Their last alert email looked different and updated in design.

You can also grab Bing's RSS feed which will update based on the time criteria you define with the keywords.

I've been noticing a decline with Google Alerts for a while.

jpilcher• 13 years ago

Anyone accusing The Financial Brand of "lazy journalism" hasn't spent much time on the site. The Financial Brand uses Google Alerts to find new financial institutions starting out on Facebook. If you are assuming that The Financial Brand simply copy-pastes press releases from Google Alerts, you are way off base. Google Alerts are used to find things like http://thefinancialbrand.com/28070/50-of-the-most-spectacula... Google Alerts are used to identify banks and credit unions that are undergoing name changes and rebrands. All these are used as first-hand sources for original articles.

The site is not an "aggregation" service. Regular readers of The Financial Brand know this.

And FYI - I'd pay for the service if that what Google needs.

Sincerely,

Jeffry Pilcher, Publisher The Financial Brand

nicholassmith• 13 years ago

Not sure why people are downvoting you for coming and explaining the facts to us.

forgetcolor• 13 years ago

I've found that google alerts rarely reports new hits on my terms anymore. I know this because I also use their time tools in search to find new hits, and what it finds almost never comes in as an alert anymore. When it does it's often quite old.

mmuro• 13 years ago

I was never a user of Google Alerts until recently and noticed I rarely get emails. However, performing a search will reveal something completely different. By the time a Google Alert gets to me, I've already seen the site.

Google Alerts is largely useless for me.

SkittlesNTwix• 13 years ago

How soon until Google Alerts is retired, I wonder.

bsims• 13 years ago

I know the author of this post and notified him it had made the front page of Hacker News.

Thought it was ironic to find out from a person vs. Google Alerts.

masklinn2• 13 years ago

> Google has lost touch with its core business model: search.

It's not and it's never been their "core business model", sadly. It's their hook.

will_brown• 13 years ago

Just wanted to share how I came to use Google Alerts, because out of any software I have ever used it is the strangest introduction. In 2010 I started V-BLOOD, LLC and began distributing a blood red, vampire themed energy drink in small glass dram vials. V-Blood was doing well so I wanted to expand the product line with glass vials full of sour candy called "sour fairy dust". The supplier of the sour candy happened to be the creator of Jelly Belly. As it turned out we both had backgrounds in law and I was lucky enough to gain a mentor for V-Blood. In addition to the million other insights he gave me into the candy/convection industry, he insisted I use Google Alerts for energy drinks, candy, vampires, ect...

If Google lets Alerts go to the wayside it is a major opportunity in search for start-ups. Maybe most would disagree but I see Alerts as a stand alone product and not simply a feature for Google.

ams6110• 13 years ago

Seems to me that with something like curl or lynx, diff, a crontab, and a bit of hacking you could pretty easily come up with a script that periodically ran a search query and emailed you any new results since the last time it ran.

kamakazizuru3• 13 years ago

why not try presstler if you want to find out about ur brand? http://presstler.com

InfinityX0• 13 years ago

SEOmoz's Fresh Web Explorer is a great substitute for Google Alerts, and it was launched partially for this reason. It's not instantaneous, but it allows you many of the same functions as Alerts, with a much bigger spread.

Tool: http://freshwebexplorer.seomoz.org Post with More Depth On Usage: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/announcing-fresh-web-explorer

nicholaides• 13 years ago

"Google has lost touch with its core business model: search"

Those type of statements always bother me. Google probably knows what their core business model is.

seangransee• 13 years ago

Their core business model isn't search. It's advertising.

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

...on search results. Let's not split hairs.

teeja• 13 years ago

My experience with Blogger began after G acquired it, and it never changed (over a few hundred posts) ... just languished, like someone got a new toy and got tired of it.

"Embrace, extend, extinguish"? Maybe, or was there no potential profit in it? Reminds me of when Apple let Hypercard stagnate, then assigned someone to overhaul it, then quit that with it half-finished ... just before declaring HC "over".

rushabh• 13 years ago

Again anecdotal but Google Alerts is definitely broken. I hope Twitter is sensing a big opportunity here.

atesti• 13 years ago

I wonder if Google Alerts will even survive until the next spring cleaning

hknozcan• 13 years ago

I did not realize this either due to extensive email traffic but it makes sense. I took time and added a couple alerts the other day. If it is broken, why have us spend time and rely on it.

lazylizard• 13 years ago

http://tattlerapp.com/ does this work?

An Open Letter to Google: Google Alerts Now Useless

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