Create custom email alerts and web searches

We are going to explore Google’s custom-search facilities in some depth but we will start off with a quick and easy way to get alerts of new search results based on keywords. Imagine that you are a fan of a particular sportsperson and you would like to know the moment that Google discovers anything new posted on the internet in relation to this person. Right now, you might visit Google a few times a week to see if there is anything new listed under the search term ‘David Beckham’. Click the News heading and you will see all the most recent news stories about the footballer – and some might be just minutes or even seconds old. But there is a better way to find out when new information appears in Google search index.

Launch your web browser and type www.google.com/alerts into the Address or Location bar at the top. This is the home page of Google’s Alerts service. You can use this to instruct Google to alert you the moment it finds any new content on the internet that matches a given keyword or keywords. It is very simple to use and, at its most basic, does not require registration. Just type a search term into the appropriate box, formatting it exactly as you would for a normal Google search. So, for example, if you want alerts for David Beckham it is better to put the search term in double quotes – “David Beckham” – otherwise Google will alert you for every new mention of David or Beckham, rather than David Beckham.

Next, there are a couple of dropdown menus. The Type menu lets you choose what category of content Google will search on your behalf. Comprehensive is the default choice but this essentially means almost everything on the web, which might be a bit overwhelming for someone who is so famous. It could be, for instance, that you are just interested in viewing new video clips of David Beckham, in which case pick Video from the Type dropdown menu. The choices on the ‘How often’ dropdown menu are self-explanatory – pick ‘once a day’ and Google will email you once a day. Finally, enter your email address and click the Create Alert button.

Google will send an email with a verification link that will need to be clicked before the alert becomes active, so go to your email program (or Google Mail webmail window in our case) and click the first link. And that’s it, the alert is active. From now on, Google will send an email to the schedule you set containing links and summaries of all the new videos its search system has indexed about David Beckham. You can add more alerts in the same way, or cancel an existing alert by clicking the second link in the verification email. However, if you want more control over these alerts, you will need to sign in to (or sign up for) a Google account. Go back to the Google Alerts home page and click the Sign in link.

If you don’t already have a Google account then you will need to sign up for one. Click the ‘Create an account now’ link just below the main sign-in form, fill in the registration form and follow the instructions to sign in. Otherwise, just type in your existing Google account username and password into the relevant boxes and click the Sign in button.

You will now be logged in to the alerts-management page. From here you can view a list of all your existing alerts, modify (edit) them, delete old or otherwise unwanted alerts and add new ones. If you click an alert entry, you can also view the results immediately (rather than waiting for, say, your scheduled once-a-week alert email). If you also use an RSS feed reader then you can use this page to generate a custom RSS feed from an alert, which you can then subscribe to and read in your feed reader. If you are interested in doing this, read the next step. Otherwise, skip to Step 8.

To turn an alert into an RSS feed, first click the ‘edit’ link alongside the alert’s entry. Now select Feed from the dropdown menu under the ‘Deliver to’ heading, and then click the Save button. If you now hover the mouse pointer over the Feed link or the adjacent orange RSS icon the feed’s subscription address will be displayed. If you use Google Reader, click the View in the Google Reader link to have this added as a subscription. Otherwise, right-click the Feed link and choose Copy Shortcut or Copy Link (depending on your browser) to copy the link to the Windows Clipboard. Now go to your feed-reader application and paste this link into the appropriate subscription box.

Alerts are useful but they are not terribly flexible and can lack focus. For example, commanding Google to alert you to new online references to David Beckham is going to result in a massive amount of information. Even if you narrow the alert down to the News category, say, you could still end up being sent hundreds of links each week, or even each day. In these circumstances, a Google custom search might be more appropriate – so direct your web browser to www.google.com/cse.

Unlike Google Alerts, the use of Google’s custom search facilities requires a Google account. So, if you don’t have one, sign up for one now and then rejoin us. When you sign in to Google custom search for the first time, you will be met with this introduction page – just click the Create a Custom Search Engine button to proceed.

Google’s custom search lets you limit searches to particular websites, or emphasise particular websites when searching the entire web. So continuing with our David Beckham example, you might want to set up a Google search engine that searches only the BBC News Sport website for new David Beckham references. That way, you can be pretty sure that any results will be both sports-related and news. Begin by giving your new search engine a fitting name – we are calling ours ‘Search BBC Sport’ – and then, if you want, type in a description.

To limit this search engine’s focus, select the ‘Only sites I select’ radio button. The second radio button (‘The entire web, but emphasize sites I select’) would cause the search engine to put results from your preferred sites at the top of the results list, while still searching the entire web – and you may prefer this method. The third radio button is not much use to us here, as it searches the whole web. We will explain how or why this is might be more useful than using Google itself a little later. Now, in the ‘Select some sites’ box, type in the website addresses (URLs) for every site you want Google to search, using a new line for each one. In our case, we are interested only in results from the BBC News Sport site, so we have typed in http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport. In the unlikely event that you are prepared to pay Google $100 to remove adverts from your custom search, click the Business edition radio button. Otherwise, keep the default Standard edition selection, tick the box to signal your agreement to Google’s terms and conditions and then click Next.

The custom search engine is now ready. If you click the Finish button you can now create more custom searches (if you want). Alternatively, you can try the new search engine right away: just type a search query in the box at the top and click the Search button. We searched for David Beckham (and didn’t bother with quotes this time) and, as you can see from our screenshot, the results are confined to the Sport section of the BBC News website.

To edit or see a view of your custom search engines click My Account (at the top right) and then click My Search Engines. You will now be presented with a list of custom search engines you have created. To alter the sites an engine searches, or other details, click the adjacent ‘control panel’ link. To remove it, click ‘delete’. To use a custom search engine, just click its entry in the list. When you do this, the page will change to resemble the normal Google search page, but with your search engine’s custom name at the top and some usage statistics displayed lower down. You can also share this search engine with someone else – just copy the address in the web browser’s Address or Location and paste it into an email, for example.

Finally, you can make use of Google’s custom search engines on your own website. Most commonly, this would be to offer a Google search box on your own site to allow visitor’s to search the site’s content, though it’s up to you how to use it. You could, for instance, include the BBC Sport search engine on a sports blog, as an aid to readers. To do this, return to the Google custom search home page and click the ‘custom search element’ link alongside the relevant search engine. Now copy the HTML code that Google has automatically generated and paste it to the relevant part of your website or blog: the custom search box will now appear in that place and, whenever people use it, the search will be executed according to the way you set it up.