There has been no official announcement yet, but the signs are ominous. Following last month’s decision to kill off Google Reader, it seems Google Alert’s days may also be numbered.
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, blogs) based on your choice of query – for example, keeping updated on emerging healthcare trends. You can control how often you receive these alerts (daily or weekly), whether you wish to receive all mentions, or limit it to the most relevant, and you can add new alerts, or delete old ones at any point.
I have certainly noticed less frequent Google Alerts emails in my inbox over the past few months and while this has bothered me less now that I keep up with healthcare industry news via content curation sites such as Scoop.it , it is nevertheless a loss when it comes to using the service as a free brand or term monitoring tool.
So what are the alternatives to Google Reader?
Whilst Feedly proved a good alternative to Google Reader, no strong viable alternatives to Google Alerts at the same price (i.e. free) have emerged so far as contenders. For now, I have decided to trial Social Mention which tracks blogs, blog comments, Twitter, mainstream news, images, video, and audio. The service promises free daily email alerts of your brand, company or marketing campaign. Unfortunately when I signed up for an alert with Social Mention today this is the message I received:
So I will have to wait a while longer to see how it performs as a daily alert service. In the meantime, I will continue to use Twitter hashtags, Twitter search, scoop.it and newsle.
Do you currently use Google Alerts? Will you miss the service if it is retired by Google? Or have you found a viable alternative which you would recommend?
Health Care Social Media 