Take the passive-agressive approach with Google – Let Google Alerts continuously scan the internet for you

Everyone knows that you can search the internet with Google.  But most don’t know that you can also have Google search the internet FOR YOU daily.  Kind of like your own internet butler, always on the lookout for websites, blog posts, news articles that contain specific information you are trying to track.

Google has a service called “Google Alerts“.  Basically, you enter a list of specific topics that you want tracked.  Google will then send you emails with links to web pages that it finds with those search terms.

You can also limit the links to News stories, Blog posts, Newsgroups, or websites (or all of the above).  You can also tell Google Alerts how often you want to be notified — each time it finds a single new item, once-a-day digest, or even just once-a-week.

Some of the example or suggested uses for GoogleAlerts is:

One obvious GoogleAlert to set-up is for your own name — make sure you put in all variations including your nicknames, formal names, maiden names, full names with middle names, etc.

After you sign-up, you’ll have to “confirm” the subscription to Google Alerts by clicking on a link in an email they send immediately — so that they make sure you gave the correct email address and that you have access to that email account as well.

I recommend setting up different alerts for different topics.  You can set-up up to 1000 different Google Alerts.  If you want to manage all of them together, you can log into your general Google Account (free if you don’t have one).  Here you can modify, delete, add all your alerts together in one place.  Once you start to receive the alerts, you’ll figure out what how to better focus your alerts search terms.