Talkwalker Alerts is a solid Google Alerts alternative
Google Alerts back in the day was a great service and while it is still available today, I have the feeling that it does not work that well anymore.
So what does it do? You can create alerts for any phrase, think Windows Blue, Ghacks or your full name, to receive alerts whenever a new item is discovered by Google's search engine. Alerts can be delivered to an email account or to an RSS reader as RSS feeds.
I have been using Google Alerts for a long time and the main impression that I have about the feature is that it is finding less information than before, and that it may share the fate of Google Reader eventually.
Ken Saunders informed me about a new service called Talkwalker Alerts that mimics Google's service in any way imaginable. If you ever created a Google Alert you will find the create form on the Talkwalker Alerts website look familiar to you as it resembles Google's form.
You do need to enter a search query, that is the phrase you are interested in receiving updates for, and an email address. The remaining fields are optional but let you narrow down the results to a certain language, type of platform they have been published on, and also define how often and when you will be able to retrieve the information.
You need to confirm your email address on first use but can use the service freely from that moment on. The manage interface displays all search queries that you have created in a similar manner as Google Alerts.
Here you can turn email deliver on or off, and access the RSS feeds the system creates for you. To subscribe to the feeds hover over an RSS icon at the left side of a query, right-click it and select to copy the link. If your feed reader is linked to the browser, left-clicking will do as well.
You can create new alerts here or delete existing ones. The import option at the top can be used to import a CSV file with alerts which you can do on the Google Alerts website for the feeds you are interested in. That's excellent to run both services side by side for a while to see which is better suited in keeping you in the loop.
Talkwalker Alerts supports several kinds of search queries which may come in handy to customize the results further. While you can simply enter a keyword or phrase and be done with it, you can combine it with advanced search parameters that Google Search supports. From using Boolean operators such as AND or OR, over the use of quotes and wildcard searches to a proximity search option.
No service is perfect on the other hand and it is likely that you will still miss out on new items. The advantage that the new service has over Google Alerts, besides being more active to begin with, is that it is also more likely that its developers will update it regularly to improve it further, something that Google does not seem to have done for years.
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Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.