Google News Alerts

It's a good idea but I would rather them create an XML type format page that I can parse.

For example say I want all the top stories for a specific day or for a specific section (sci\tech, world, business, etc). This would be awesome!

I hate this stuff because it just clogs up my email. So I end up deleting it all when it comes in and eventually just turning the damn thing off. I had this problem when I was trying to get updated on my favorite sports team. 90% of the stuff that came to my email was junk I already knew. It would have been much better if I could have just gone to a webpage once a day where it listed all of these articles and I could pick out which ones I wanted to read.

For instance, I like reading Jeremy's blog but that doesn't mean I want all of his blog updates coming to my email box. I like it the way it is, where I can just visit his blog once a day.

Now if they could figure out a way to dynamicly group that data for me (like your XML idea) that would be great. For instance, right now Yahoo allows me to pick news sections I want to read, like the NFL. But if I want all the articles related to Priest Holmes or the Kansas City Chiefs it becomes much more difficult. I either have to subscribe to those gay email alerts or I have to browse through all the NFL articles trying to find article titles that might be about what I want.

Google seem to be getting into alerting in many ways: there's also Google Alert which does the same for their web index.

Google news alerts can get very specific for you. Just use the advanced features. I'm sure many have overlooked this tip on their FAQ: The advanced search page on Google News provides a number of ways to fine tune a search to eliminate unwanted results. You can incorporate these techniques in your Google news alert settings by selecting the conditions you want on the Google News advanced search page, then clicking the "Google Search" button. When the results page appears, copy the text that appears in the search box on that page and paste it into the box on the Google News Alerts home page labeled "Articles must contain these words." I hope that helps.

I agree with Justin, an XML format would be far far more useful.

Julian Bond wrote a very handy PHP script that will take any Google News search and turn it into an RSS feed. I use it in my left sidebar to pull a hometown news feed.

"Of course, we've had alerts on Yahoo! for ages."

Yeah, but how the hell am I supposed to know about them? Even doing a page search on Yahoo (ctrl-f in browser) doesn't find anything to do with "alert" - how to use a feature if it's not even linked!?

Give Scott some time, and I am sure Feedster will have this as well.

i think googleup may be confusing the google web update alert they linked to with something google are actually doing themselves

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I am interested in finding out how Google selects the sources they use for their news. I have a client who wants to know why they don't show up for an industry news topic but their competitor does. They both carry industry news. How does Google decide which news source to consult?