Google Alerts May Be Dead, and You Don't Even Know It

March 22, 2013
28 comments

Google Alerts May Be Dead, and You Don’t Even Know It

Google Alerts Dead End

Oh Google, you love to draw me in only to drop my favorite services. I have come to rely on Google Alterts to deliver relevant, timely content into my inbox on a broad array of subjects. Google Alerts may already be dead, and you don’t even know it. Especially, as I’ve been talking about content curation so much recently, Google Alerts is one of the top entry points into my content funnel.

The frequency and depth of my Google Alerts began to wane in December 2012, but in late January I noticed that the lag in reporting was far from “as it happens.” Ego alerts were taking 3-4 days to hit my inbox where they took minutes only months ago. So, when I saw Danny Sullivan’s postÂ Dear Google Alerts: Why Arenâ€™t You Working?Â I knew that I wasn’t alone:

One of Googleâ€™s oldest features isÂ Google Alerts, where you can enter keywords you want to monitor and get an email report each day about any new search results that match those terms. It was awesome; but for several weeks, itâ€™s become nearly useless. –

While Danny figures out the problem with Google, I thought I would do a quick roundup of Google Alerts Alternatives. Specifically, I am looking for the following criteria.

Price
Comprehensiveness – What networks does the service search?
Timeliness – How quickly does the service provide results after publication?
Email – Does the service deliver results by email?
RSS – Does the service provide an RSS feed of results?
Accuracy – Are the results that are being delivered accurate?
AI – Does the service learn from your input and improve results over time?

	Price	Comp.	Timeliness	Email	RSS	Accuracy	AI
Buzz Stream	$29/129/mo	News	2 days	Table Cell	Table Cell	Med	Yes
GigaAlert	$5-20/mo	All	2+ days	Table Cell	Table Cell	Low	No
IQAlerts	$30-250/mo	All	1 day	Table Cell	Table Cell	High	Yes
Mention	Free – $100/mo	All	1-2 days	App	App	Med.	Yes
Social Mention	Free	Social	1-2 days	Yes	Yes	Low	No
Trackur	$27-447/mo	News & Social	1 day	Table Cell	Table Cell	High	Yes
Trap!t	Free / Beta	Some Web	2+ days	Table Cell	Table Cell	Med	Yes
Yahoo	Free	All	2+ days	Yes	No	Low	No

8 Google Alerts Alternatives

BuzzStream ($29-129/month)

Screen Shot 2013-02-24 at 10.28.09 PM

BuzzStreamÂ is a comprehensive tool for tracking social mentions and linkÂ opportunities. A one paragraph description will not do it justice. Eric Covino at SEOBookÂ wrote a comprehensive review of the tool. The PR / Social Media aspect of the tool is quite powerful by providing deep dive searching in conversation and influencer tracking.

GigaAlert ($5-20/month)

GigAlert

My experience with GigaAlert was a little spammy. When I was notified of alerts via email and I clicked the results link, I was taken to a signup page instead of the results. I understand that they are trying to get signups, but I wasn’t able to truly evaluate the service without being nagged.

IQalerts ($30-250/month)

Screen Shot 2013-02-24 at 10.30.34 PM

The setup of the search terms on IQAlerts is very intuitive. You can filter by industry and by region in addition to adding negative keywords. IQAlerts claims to haveÂ more responsive search results than Google Alerts. Of course, the expense is a major consideration with IQAlerts, the accuracy and ease of use makes it a strong replacement to Google Alerts.

Mention (free – $100/month)

MentionÂ offers applications for Mac/iOS/Android/Chrome that aggregates results into a nice user interface. This tool is well designed for content curation more than simple brand or term monitoring. I am excited to continue testing this tool as a content curator.

Social Mention (free)

Social MentionÂ is one of the first alternatives that I used to monitor social media mentions. Social Mention tracks blogs, blog comments, Twitter, mainstream news, images, video, and audio.Â It’s free and is fully featured with good dashboards, email delivery and RSS feeds. However, the search is limited to:

Blogs
Microblogs
Bookmarks
Comments
Events
Images
News
Video
Audio
Q&A

Trackur ($27-447/month)

Trackur.com HomePage

Trackur is one of the most robust engines reviewed. It is clearly an enterprise solution that allows the following:

RSS/Email alerts
Sentiment Tagging
White labeling
CSV Export
Unlimited Client Logins
Trackur Insights
Influence Metrics
Different Levels of Support

For agencies or clients that want comprehensive tracking and are willing to pay for it, Trackur is a powerful solution.

Trap!t (currently free)

Probably more in the realm of a content curatorÂ Trap!tÂ allows you to build “traps” around your focus topics. Through a broad indexing system, Trap!t performs a comprehensive web search for your topic areas. Based on your interaction with the content that it returns, it learns your preferences. The interface is really clean, but I did not find the results to update quickly.

Yahoo! Alerts (free)

Yahoo! Alerts

Yahoo Alerts dates back for years. It is truly an alert system. I have not found Yahoo! alerts to be as accurate as timely or accurate as the older Google Alerts.

Conclusion

I did not find a single solution that replaces Google Alerts with all functionality for the same price (free). Many of the newer players in this space are taking raw search results to a more advanced level by adding curation features and advanced artificialÂ intelligence.

What experience have you had with these or other alert services?

Â Image via Bigstock.Â

Pulley Media

We’re still searching for a viable alternative, and so far nothing has completely fit the bill. Thank you taking the time to put this all together.
Jeremy Floyd

Thanks! Have you tried the services that I included? Have you tried others? It seems like there has not been the need to replace alerts from a business perspective because Alerts does the job, for free, but now it seems that the opportunity is there.

This afternoon, I received an update from a blog post that I made Tuesday. It’s funny to see the related post where the alerts used to take 33 minutes.
Andy Beal

Thanks for your glowing endorsement of Trackur. We also offer a free plan, which includes Twitter monitoring, so it’s a pretty good alternative for those with no monthly budget. 🙂
driver8

I’ve spent almost an hour going through all of these, and as you said Jeremy – there is nothing for free that can replace Google Alerts.

I can’t justify the expense of a pro product, so that leaves me with :
– TRAP.IT – pretty, but Flipboard & Zite seem similar & better
– Yahoo!Alerts – with an interface going back to the days of Win95, this looks terrible but seems the only comparable free option. But the “Keyword Alerts” doesn’t have the options of Google Alerts, and given Yahoo’s track record of neglecting products like Flickr, I can’t imagine they’ll be updating their features/gui any time soon, even to try and steal some of Google’s thunder. Anyone know Marissa Mayer well enough to give her a headsup ?? 🙂
Jeremy Floyd

I agree. There is not a perfect alternative to Google Alerts.

Have you tried TalkWalker? I was encouraged to sign up for it, but I have had problems getting the service to work.
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JB

I’ve been experimenting with TalkWalker for a few days, and I’m most impressed by it’s potential among the other options, but it’s got problems, too.

1. Spam. They seem to index a lot of sites that content scrape or aggregate another site’s content, so I get duplicate results or results that merely point to other sites, which I’d like to filter out. I can do that per query… but I wish they’d work on eliminating the obvious aggregators automatically.

2. No black-list. If I’m searching for industry-specific terms, and i know or discover through results that some sites are just aggregators/scrapers that Google Alerts seemed to automatically avoid, I’d like to be able to black-list them globally, instead of setting up “NOT site:xxx” conditions in every query. If TW doesn’t avoid them automatically, I think a black-list option is a no brainer to offer. Tweaking every query I have by hand gets tedious when I have 50+ queries.

3. Name searching seems iffy. Again, something seemed to “just work” with Google, I could search for (John OR Jon OR J) Doe and get results that hit any of the 3 name types immediately followed by “Doe”. In TW, I get results with any of the 3 name types and the word Doe *anywhere* else in the page. I could use a proximity type search, but I imported my search terms from Google Alerts via CSV and that’s a LOT to modify.

4. Their “country” options seem cool – I want only English, and US results.. .but again, I’d have to add search terms to every query for that.

5. Support. They use GetSatisfaction.com as a platform for handling support questions, but mine have gone unanswered for a day. Not even a “Thanks, we’ll look into that” response. That’s a little frustrating- then again, after Google’s world renowned level of support (/sarcasm), I shouldn’t complain.

So if you’re just setting up, have a lot of time to tweak, and/or don’t mind starting small, they seem pretty good. I get email all day (RSS works for any query or all queries, and I’ll switch to RSS eventually, but I wanted to watch the first results closely). I just wish some of the options were possible to set up globally, etc.
Jeremy Floyd

Man, JB, what a fantastic review of TalkWalker. Thank you!

This is more lazy than anything else, but when I signed up for TalkWalker, it didn’t send the confirmation email out for some time, then when I tried to clickthru on my iPhone it bombed out. In theory it seems pretty good. Your review is great!
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Gloria

Nice list, but how about Brand24.net? It’s quite affordable, easy to use and very efficient solution. It works great for any kind of business, small and also huge companies and single person also. This tool has many useful features as colaborative work, alerts, mobile app, etc. Recommend to check the free trial!