Yahoo! Search Alerts: a Google Alerts alternative
Update: It appears that Yahoo! retired Search Alerts. The link pointing to the page on Yahoo redirects automatically to the homepage of Yahoo! now.
If you are running an online business, want to monitor your online reputation or simply want to stay up to date on a topic of interest, then you may be using Google Alerts for that purpose. You pick keywords, your name, a brand or a topic of interest like your favorite sports team, and receive alerts via RSS or email whenever a new web page makes it appearance in the search that is associated with it.
Yahoo! Search Alerts works in a similar fashion. Unlike Google Alerts which offer RSS and email notification options, Yahoo! Search Alerts support only notifications via email.
The service works in a similar fashion in all other regards though. Please note that you do need a Yahoo account to create and manage alerts, and that you can only send alerts to an email address assigned to that account.
The Manage Alerts page displays all tools needed to add, edit and delete alerts. You have the following options here on this page:
- Send my alert to defines the email address all alerts on the page are send to.
- Search keyword is a phrase or single word that you want to monitor. Examples are your name, the name of a brand, a celebrity you have a crush on or your favorite TV show.
- Results defines the types of information that you are interested in. You can use a catch all option, or limit results to news, web, images or video results.
- Frequency determines when you are informed about new hits. You can get a daily roundup email or get emails as soon as a new entry is identified by Yahoo!.
- Preview displays a short preview on the page that you can use to test the alert. It can help you redefine a keyword in case you are getting none or too broad hits.
- Trash deletes the selected alert.
Here are a couple of examples to get you started:
- If you want to monitor your name, the name of a family member or friend, enter it under search keyword and leave everything as is otherwise. You get notifications by email whenever a new entry appears on Yahoo!. This works best if your name is not that common, or if the person that you want to monitor this way is prominent.
- You can monitor your favorite sports team or a player, for instance for Fantasy Sports, to make sure you get word of injuries right away.
- Webmasters can monitor the names or urls of their websites using Yahoo! Alerts so that they receive notifications when it is mentioned on the Internet. This can be quite useful to spot sites that link to the domain in question, but also to find complaints and other issues that users may have (e.g. on Web of Trust or forums).
- Image alerts can be useful if you want to find new images of a celebrity as soon as they get posted. Or, you can monitor the Internet to make sure that no images of yourself or a family member leaks to it.
While it may be enough to just use Yahoo! Search Alerts to receive notifications on things that are important to you, businesses and webmasters should use multiple sources to make sure they catch everything.
Here are a couple of additional services that you may want to consider adding to your repertoire:
- Mention is free for 2 alerts and 250 mentions max.
- Social Mention monitors social media and networks exclusively. Alerts currently disabled but are supposed to be back in a week's time.
- Talkwalker Alerts is a free alternative that you can use to create email alerts. No registration required.
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.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.