Google Alerts: Another Way to Stay Informed

Yesterday the Ontario Government announced grants for hiring interns. Did you know about that? I heard about it from one of my Google Alerts. I also heard about the job in Manitoba that I posted yesterday, a vacancy that had not appeared in any of my other sources.

Interested?

Google Alerts are dead easy to set up, and you can get the alerts that it creates in either email or RSS feed form.

Log in to Google before or after you go to http://www.google.com/alerts.

Because I have a Google email address Google it into the 'Deliver to' box for me. It's possible that you will need to do this yourself, if you want email alerts. Otherwise, use the triangle to the right to select a feed.

If you select email alerts then you might prefer to receive them all at once, 'Once a day.' However, that's your choice; you can click on the triangle to receive alerts as they occur. You can choose to receive results from all sources, the web, news, blogs and so on, in other words 'Everything', or just from some of these using another triangle to expose the appropriate list.

The stuff that goes in 'Search query' seems to be what goes into any Google query. In the following view you can see that I query for "employment counselling" (with the quotation marks) because I want to see all new occurrences of items with these words together in this order (and not just anywhere in the items).

As I keyed in the search string Google displayed some typical results for me in the right-hand column. Satisfied with those I clicked on 'Create Alert' to receive the following display. Actually it's part of the full list of my Google Alerts. 

I notice that, if you have created RSS feeds and change your mind you can have email alerts instead.

One more item for the toolbox.