Google Alerts to add RSS
By Jonathan Bailey • Oct 10th, 2008 • Category: Articles, News, Products
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Walter Mossberg about how to use alerts to keep track of the Web dropped something of a bombshell for those of us who use Google Alerts every day. According to Mossberg, Google Alerts will begin adding RSS alerts in addition to email ones “in about a month”.
Google Alerts, which is a service that sends out notices when content carrying the alert search term appears on the Web, currently only sends out its alerts via email. It is commonly used for vanity searches, for keeping on top of who mentions a person or site, and for keeping track of content, either through searches for statistically improbable phrases or digital fingerprints.
What this means to you will probably depend on how heavily you use RSS and how much use you make of Google Alerts. If you are not currently using Google Alerts and want to get started, I’ve created a screencast to help you understand the basics.
Obviously, I’ll have more to say on this once the new feature is made public.
However, at this time, I don’t see myself making heavy use of the RSS feature. I literally have years of experience meshing Google Alerts with email filters and creating a workflow around it. Though such a system could be moved to RSS easily, I don’t see how much is gained in my case.
Clearly though, this feature is not for people like myself and other current heavy users of Google Alerts, instead, it is for those who don’t because they can’t get the alerts in the format they want. This will change that and let them receive their alerts in a variety of places including their RSS reader, their Google home page and through a variety of mashup services.
Needless to say, this opens up a lot of new doors for Google Alerts but, personally, I’m just happy to hear that the service is still receiving some attention. After being so long without a significant upgrade, it is nice to see that Google is still working on their Google Alerts product.
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Jonathan Bailey is The Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today, which he founded in 2005 as a way to help Webmasters going through content theft problems get accurate information and stay up to date on the rapidly-changing field. He is also a consultant to Webmasters and companies to help them devise practical content protection strategies and develop good copyright policies.
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Ok, ill give you one strong reason: RSS is FASTER
The reason why this is somerhing good is because RSS is suposedly faster than e-mail delivery, and no matter how fast and local, google emails are being sent, they still will have to go through a process of mail queu, on the other hand, by rss, you should maybe at a certain point, define the refresh of your feeds, optimizing time, freeing servers and the most important, receiving the news in the shortest amount of time.
Of course, this will also depend on whether email alerts and rss will be sent out at the same time.
It's not only a question of format, but rather, the speed it can provide in data transmission.
As well as the reduction of many times anuecessary content traffic.
I actually have to disagree with that. Though it would depend on the nature of your mail queue, I think that for most email would actually be faster.
The reason is this. Google Reader updates feeds once an hour, less if there is only one subscriber (something that would be true for nearly all Google Alert feeds). As such, there will be an average delay of about 30 minutes before any new item appears. Email, in those cases, would likely be much faster, probably taking less than 10 minutes.
Granted, there are ways to mitigate this but what the speed issue comes down to is how you have your email setup vs. how you have your RSS set up. For some feeds will be faster, others will get more quickness out of email.
Still, I don't think that a delay of even an hour is going to be much to most Google Alert users. Most, I doubt, check their alerts often enough to notice.
Just my theory though, I could be wrong.
Thank you for your thoughts!
I actually have to disagree with that. Though it would depend on the nature of your mail queue, I think that for most email would actually be faster.
The reason is this. Google Reader updates feeds once an hour, less if there is only one subscriber (something that would be true for nearly all Google Alert feeds). As such, there will be an average delay of about 30 minutes before any new item appears. Email, in those cases, would likely be much faster, probably taking less than 10 minutes.
Granted, there are ways to mitigate this but what the speed issue comes down to is how you have your email setup vs. how you have your RSS set up. For some feeds will be faster, others will get more quickness out of email.
Still, I don't think that a delay of even an hour is going to be much to most Google Alert users. Most, I doubt, check their alerts often enough to notice.
Just my theory though, I could be wrong.
Thank you for your thoughts!
I actually have to disagree with that. Though it would depend on the nature of your mail queue, I think that for most email would actually be faster.
The reason is this. Google Reader updates feeds once an hour, less if there is only one subscriber (something that would be true for nearly all Google Alert feeds). As such, there will be an average delay of about 30 minutes before any new item appears. Email, in those cases, would likely be much faster, probably taking less than 10 minutes.
Granted, there are ways to mitigate this but what the speed issue comes down to is how you have your email setup vs. how you have your RSS set up. For some feeds will be faster, others will get more quickness out of email.
Still, I don't think that a delay of even an hour is going to be much to most Google Alert users. Most, I doubt, check their alerts often enough to notice.
Just my theory though, I could be wrong.
Thank you for your thoughts!