Alert Services

This is a listing of the alerts I have set up and a critique on how effective they are.

Google Alerts

For Google Alerts I setup some basic queries to send me updates every day. The first queries I did were ["seed funding"], [venture capital], and [web startup]. Overall I found Google Alerts to be semi effective. There were typically 1-3 very good links in each email but the rest were usually a mix of junk.

Google Alert

I overall just didn't like Google Alert compared to Google Alerts. The biggest problem I had with Google Alert was the formatting, it just wasn't very readable in my e-mail client (Outlook). The results were also not necessarily any more precise than the Google Alerts. My query for Google Alert was: [entrepreneur].

Yahoo Alerts

I didn't really find an applicable way to use Yahoo Alerts for the project. All of the categories for Yahoo Alerts were not very specific to my topic and were only really good for personal and day to day items not a specific topic.

Page Monitors

Because of the nature of my topic and focusing on a lot of internet based ideas along with startups and entrepreneurship I've found that a huge majority of resources have RSS feeds attached. This led to page monitors not being so necessary in a lot of circumstances. One thing I did find was that digests and news letters are very useful. These are basically page monitors set up for specific sites through the site and I found them very useful. I am still looking for a site without RSS to track.

Grade

Page monitors get a C-, they have just been replaced by modern RSS in most instances, especially with a group of sites involved in startups.
Alerts get a B, they are useful but seem like they are the most useful for using them to track a person. This way you can define a much more adequate query that won't get too many irrelevant results (as long as you aren't dealing with John Smith).

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