Google Alerts - What it Does, and Doesn't Do

Legacy News (the news blog for the genealogy software company) on December 17th wrote How to Create a Google Alert

By creating a Google Alert, whenever Google finds your word or phrase that you are interested in, Google will automatically send you an email. For example, I am searching for an ancestor....If, today, I don't find anything relevant, I can create a Google Alert for his name, and then work on other things, ... Then, if someone publishes new information to a website that Google finds, I'll get an email with a direct link to the new page.

I've seen this tip on a few other blogs since then. It is very misleading in a crucial manner. In my Year in Review entry I linked to my July post on this topic, but it bears repeating since several people seem to be misled.

To quote the second question and answer from the Frequently Asked Questions page for Google Alerts (emphasis added):

2. What are the different types of alerts I can sign up for?

Google Alerts currently offers 6 variations of alerts - 'News', 'Web', 'Blogs', 'Comprehensive', 'Video' and 'Groups'.

* A 'News' alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.
* A 'Web' alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.
* A 'Blogs' alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.
* A 'Comprehensive' alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.
* A 'Video' alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.
* A 'Groups' alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

How often do you find that one hit you're searching for on the third, fifth, or 10th page in the Google Search results? Google Alerts will NEVER alert you to that hit, unless it makes it to the first two pages (twenty results) for a web search. If you're using a News Alert or Blog Alert, it will only tell you if it makes the first ten results.

So if you set up those Google Alerts and think everything is done for you and you never need to search Google manually again --- you're wrong. Unless you're OK with only knowing about the top 10 or 20 results. If that's all you want, then Google Alerts is perfect for the job.