Using Google Alerts with JamiQ

Google Alerts is one of the most widely used monitoring tools on the Web today. Since Google's search engine covers most of the Web, Google Alerts is a simple and powerful way to get updates when someone mentions a keyword you're monitoring. Google Alerts also allows you to track specifically News, Blogs, Websites, Google Group Discussions, Videos, or everything together. Apart from getting email alerts from Google, you can also get your updates as RSS feeds. Here's how to switch from email alerts to RSS feeds for use with JamiQ:

1. Visit http://alerts.google.com
2. Log in with your Google or Gmail account
3. Click on “click here to manage your alerts” at the bottom left of the page
4. If you have an existing Google Alert already running, click “edit” on the right of that Alert
5. Under the column “Deliver to”, select “Feed” and press Save
6. You will now notice that under the Alert's “Deliver to” column instead of Email, you will have a link called “Feed”
7. Right click the link “Feed” and copy the link. This is your Alert's RSS feed
8. Add this link to your JamiQ Topic of choice

Note: Google Alert RSS feeds may not immediately update immediately. Do give it some time to refresh before you see updates on your Dashboard

By switching your Google Alert from Email to Feed, you will not get email alerts from Google anymore. If you still want email alerts, you can either use JamiQ's Email Alerts which sends you the latest updates from every Topic or create another Google Alert for the same search term with “Deliver to” set to Email.

For more help with Google Alerts, visit http://www.google.com/support/alerts/

Search News by Location

If you specify in your Google Alert setup that you would only like to receive news alerts, you can specify additionally a location operator. For example:

location:Australia uranium

This query will mostly return news from Australian sources regarding uranium mining.

Do an Exception Search

Say, you are a market research analyst, and your client is A (Client A) in the video games industry. Besides knowing where your client will be mentioned, you will also want to know where your client is not (when your client should have been).

To do this, you can construct a query like this -

"video game OR gaming" -"client A"