Google Alerts

Ending our month of using the Internet to help you as a writer, I want to tell you about Google Alerts. I think Google Alerts is one of the coolest things – it will help you find new web posts that you are interested in. I think I first heard of it when Shonna used it to find out who was talking about our new web site when we started Routines for Writers.

You get an email each day with a list of all the links where Google found a post with your target words. I set up – Routines for Writers – right away and got emails every day. But I had to scroll through each email looking for posts that actually related to our site. There might be 6 or 8 sites Google found with a new post using the word “routines” or “writers” but few of them mentioned our site, Routines for Writers.

I also set up an alert for my name – Kitty Bucholtz. I wanted to see if any magazine articles I’ve sold have been put on the Internet. I again got emails every day. But many of the links were about other people with my last name, or other people or uses of my first name. (Thankfully, Google apparently did not send me links to porn sites with the word/name “Kitty” on them!)

I finally remembered – when you want to do a search for a phrase, you have to put quotes around the phrase! I went back and edited both of my Alerts to “Routines for Writers” and “Kitty Bucholtz” (capitalization isn’t important) and voila! Now I only get an email if a blog or other web site mentions those words together, which means pretty much all the links really do refer to our web site or me. Yay!

I haven’t created an Alert for a specific piece of information yet, or for a specific person besides myself. But when I get ready to start my agent hunt again, I’ll do an alert for the one or two I’m most interested in. That way I should be able to find “Joe Smith” at his web site, his blog, and every time he’s interviewed. It’ll make the research easier and I won’t have to continue to go back to the same sites over and over just in case something new is mentioned about him. (Remember from the last two weeks of my posts here, you can also add his web site and/or blog to the multiple tabs you open every day in your browser, and you can add his blog to your Google Reader account so you don’t miss anything.)

I hope you try this and find the interesting information you’re looking for! Enjoy!

P.S. Thanks, Shonna, for finding this and telling me and Stephanie about it!