Web Tips

One of the best things about the Web is that you can read thousands of newspapers any time you like. Unfortunately, most of us don't have the time to read thousands of newspapers -- nor the money to hire an assistant to do it for us. I've been waiting for a computer program that will troll thousands of news sites all day long and e-mail me just the links I'm most interested in. Once again, Google comes to the rescue.

Every time I start to write a column about a non-Google related tip, Google comes along and invents a new, great tool. This time it's Google News Alerts, which are e-mailed to you when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify.

(Note: This is different from Google Alerts, a tool I wrote about a few weeks ago that e-mails you links to any Web pages -- not just news stories -- found via the main Google search engine.)

E-mail News Alerts aren't new -- Yahoo and The New York Times are among those offering them (see my previous column about their alerts). But The New York Times recently started charging for its e-mail alerts. Yahoo's are quite good, but the site still only sends you links to the content on its news site.

What makes Google's so powerful is that Google News trolls 4,500 news sources continuously throughout the day -- and you can set the alert to send you links to related articles as soon as Google News find them. So if you're writing about the debate over the Episcopal Church's first openly-gay bishop, for example, you can set an alert to send you an e-mail as soon as any of 4,500 news sites posts an article containing the words "gay" and "bishop." Now that's service!

If this service works well -- and based on my early testing, it does -- it may very well undercut The New York Times' attempt to charge for its e-mail alerts.

Signing up is free and easy. Just enter the words you want Google to search for, how often you want to get the alerts, and your e-mail address. Google then sends you a confirmation e-mail with a URL you click on to activate the alert.

If you want to cancel the alert, just click on the "cancel" link at the end of the e-mail the next time an alert comes. It's that simple.

You can also limit your alerts by news source or country, and search for exact phrases or exclude certain phrases.

Here's how to:

• Limit by source: If you want to set up an alert that will send you a link every time The New York Times runs a story related to Iraq, enter "iraq source:new_york_times" in the search terms box.
• Limit by country: If you want to set up an alert that will send you a link any time a publication based in New York or Britain runs a story related to Iraq, enter the syntax "iraq location:ny" or "iraq location:uk"
• Exact phrase searching: Enclose the phrase in quotes
• Search for any of the words listed: Include "or" between the words: "jakarta or bombing"
• Exclude words: To search for articles that include "Jakarta" but not "bombing," use the minus sign and enter the phrase: jakarta -bombing

Unfortunately there's no advanced page to guide you through this, like there now is for the main Google News. That's because the Google News Alerts tool is still a "beta," or experimental, version. You can't even get to Google News Alerts from the main Google News page yet -- you have to go straight to this URL: http://www.google.com/newsalerts.

If you enter the wrong word when setting up your news alert, you can't change it. You have to cancel it and then sign up for a new one. But it's so easy to do, that's not a big deal.

One more significant problem with the way the system is set up is that you have to set up each alert seperately -- so you can't get one e-mail containing links to all the alerts you set up. For those who get a lot of e-mail, that would be a nice feature.

If you're going to try using Google News Alerts -- which I recommend -- make sure to be very specific with the words you enter and use the syntax I listed above when setting up your alerts. Otherwise you'll find yourself getting too many alerts.