Discover Google’s news-delivery service

Load your web browser as usual and visit www.google.com. When the page loads, click the ‘more’ link at the top and then choose ‘even more’ from the dropdown menu. The next page displays a list of Google’s currently available services and products. Click Alerts at the top left. Fill in the form shown here with the search item (hay fever) the type of alert (comprehensive) how often it should be sent (daily) and the email address it’s going to. Any email address can receive alerts, but a free Google account is required to manage them properly.

Once the alert has been created, Google will process it and then send out a confirmation email to the address given in the form. When it arrives, click the link at the top to confirm the address or click the one underneath it to cancel the alert. Then, flip back to the alerts page and sign in with a valid Google account to see and manage the alert service. Like we said, it’s not necessary to have a Google account to set up alerts, but you do need one in order to manage them – it’s free and really worthwhile.

Alerts look very much like standard Google search results because that’s essentially what they are. Click the links to jump to the pages they refer to or click the ‘See all stories on this topic’ to check out how different services are covering the same story. The comprehensive setting will deliver alerts from news sources, web pages, blogs, videos and discussion groups. To refine or otherwise manage an alert, scroll to the bottom of the message and click the Manage link.

This switches back to the web browser and opens the Google Alerts settings page. Select the alert that needs changing from the list and choose Edit; then use the dropdown menus to alter any of the alert settings as necessary. Here for example we’re altering our hay fever alert so that’s it switches from Comprehensive (which was producing too many results) to plain old News. We’ve also changed the frequency to once a week to reduce the number of alerts further.

As well as editing existing alerts, this page can be used to set up new ones. Just click the New Alert button and then type in the item to search for, the type, the frequency and so on. Note that by default, Google sends alerts formatted as HTML emails (that means they’ll display fancy formatting unless the email program is specifically set to only display text). To speed things, up, click the link that says ‘Switch to text emails” at the top right.

Finally, remember that the alert form shown here can use ‘proper’ Google search syntax so it’s possible to put together pretty sophisticated searches and weed out those alerts that aren’t so relevant. Here’s an example. Our hay fever alert is still producing a lot of stuff we’re not so interested in, so we’ve adapted the search item by clicking the edit link and adding “site:bbc.co.uk”. This ensures that Google will only deliver hay fever alerts from the BBC’s website. Go to www.snipurl.com/2j2bk for more tips on searching with Google.