Google Alerts added a new option to the sources dropdown: finance. Now you can get stock updates using Google Alerts.


I'm not sure if the new option works independently or you need to select other sources like web, news, blogs, discussions. You can select multiple sources for the same alert or you can pick the "automatic" option.


I created a new alert for [goog], picked news and finance, enabled "as-it-happens" and I only received news results, so I don't know if finance alerts actually work.

As previously anticipated, Google Alerts has a new interface inspired by Material Design. For some reason, Google only shows the new UI when you are logged in, while displaying the old interface if you don't log in to a Google account.

The new UI is a lot simpler and focuses on managing alerts and creating alerts with one click. The old Google Alerts homepage exposed a lot of advanced options, which are now hidden. There's a long list of alert suggestions: companies, people, countries, musical artists, industries, places, athletes, as well as your name and email address (the "me on the web" section).


For example, you can type "Google" in the huge input box at the top of the page, click "Create alert" and that's it. Google shows a preview, so you can see what results you may get.


There's a "show options" link that shows the advanced options, so you can choose sources, language and region, how often to send alerts, how many results to include and the delivery option: email or feed. The nice thing is that Google remembers your options and it uses them the next time you create a new alert.


Google Alerts lets you edit or delete alerts and shows a special icon for feed alerts.


Here's the old Google Alerts:

Anjo Cerdeña, a reader of this blog, found a new interface for Google Alerts when opening the site. It uses Material Design and it has a few new features: a "me on the web" section and a list of suggestions for companies, people. countries, places, industries and more. It also shows your alerts and a simple box for creating a new alert.


I don't see the new Google Alerts UI, so it's probably still tested by Google. I expect to see more and more Material-inspired design refreshes.

The classic Google Alerts homepage is only focused on creating new alerts and it shows a lot of advanced options, as well as some information about Google Alerts. To see your alerts, you need to click "manage your alerts".


{ Thanks, Anjo. }

Google Alerts now lets you pick the language and region when creating an alert. For example, you can create an alert for "Chrome", but restrict it to French news articles from France. You don't have to set the region, the default setting is "any region".


The new filters are great for delivering more precise results, since you can restrict the results to a language, a country or both. You no longer have to use workarounds and switch to a different domain to get alerts in a different language. Please note that the text from the Google Alerts message will be in the language you've picked.

Google's email alerts changed their interface a few days ago. Now you can share search results using Google+, Facebook and Twitter. Google shortens URLs and they have the following format: http://goo.gl/alerts/xyz.


Google added an option to edit the alert and a link to the corresponding feed.


You can also flag pages as irrelevant and help Google fine-tune its algorithms.


Here's the old layout:


{ Thanks, Dinsan and Avrohom. }

Two months ago, when Google Reader disappeared, Google Alerts dropped support for feeds. Now feeds are back and they look just like before. Feeds continue to include references to Google Reader.



"As you can see, you have the option within 'deliver to' to deliver the alert to a feed. After you click 'create alert', you will be taken to the manage Google Alerts page where you will find the RSS URL you can copy and paste into your preferred RSS reader," informs Search Engine Land. (Feeds actually use Atom, not RSS.)

It's not clear why this feature was removed, but I wouldn't mind to see Google Reader back online. Quietly brilliant.

If you read the post about the well-connected Google Reader, you probably anticipated this chain reaction. All the services that integrated with Google Reader will remove their features, now that Reader is gone.

Google Alerts no longer supports RSS delivery and recommends users to switch to email delivery. "Google Reader is no longer available. To continue receiving Google Alerts, go to http://www.google.com/alerts/manage and change your alerts to email delivery," says Google.

You're probably wondering: what's the connection between Google Alerts feeds and Google Reader? Google Alerts feeds, which were added back in 2008, had public URLs and you could use any feed reader to subscribe to them. The trouble is that the feeds were generated by Google Reader and were actually a Google Reader feature, just like the web page monitoring feature.




Unfortunately, Google doesn't offer feeds for search results and the Web Search API has been deprecated and it was too limited to create a service like Google Alerts. The only obvious alternative is to screenscrape Google results.

Talkwalker Alerts looks almost like Google Alerts and offers both email alerts and feeds. The service is free for up to 100 alerts.