Monitoring Web/Internet

We often hear about monitoring web. Generally it is related to monitoring web traffic.

Have you ever wanted to monitor web for your interest? How about different updates that you want about specific domain e.g. technology, politics and different job openings etc? Most of us will take help of Google search to get to know about something(?). How about automating this task and get updates about your interests directly in your email account? We will take help of Google to keep us informed about latest happenings around the web. 

So let’s start. Suppose we want to monitor updates regarding cloud computing and utility computing (being currently hot topics across web). Google provides interesting service called Google Alerts. We will use this service to solve our purpose.

Just sign in and you will end up in “Manage your Alerts” page. Now press “New Alert” button.You will see a new row with a text box for your search terms. Enter "Cloud Computing" | "Utility Computing" term. Then select type from the lists based on your monitoring needs such as news,blog,web,comprehensive,video and groups. We will select comprehensive for wider coverage of our term or interest. Select “Email” delivery (Feeds are also possible) and frequency as “as-it-happens” and press “Create Alerts”.

Now you will receive frequent email alerts in your Gmail account for cloud computing and utility computing. We have just seen one of the use cases of using alerts. You can also create alerts for your name to see how your name is appearing on web if you want another use case.

There is also a paid service called GoogleAlert (they are not affiliated with Google). However, I haven’t used it personally.

Let me know how you utilize Google alerts to your benefit.