I’ve been using Google Alerts for the past year or so to stay on top of a handful of topics, and I decided this weekend that it might be worth expanding their use a little more.
So, I added about ten terms that I’m interested in tracking to my alerts list for Google.
And then, I decided that it might be fun to try out Yahoo Alerts and compare what the two services provide.
My experience with Google Alerts has been interesting so far. With some news articles, the alerts I’m sent have been fairly timely. But every so often, I see an alert pointing to a page that’s more than a year old. When I see that, I wonder if Google has just discovered the page and noticed in some vast database that they hadn’t sent me a copy of it yet.
I haven’t searched to see if someone has tried this already, but it might be fun to keep track of what links I’m provided with and compare the two alert systems over a period of a few weeks or months. For example, how old are the pages that I receive an alert for? How many links am I provided per term over the length of time, and how many do I receive each day from both search engines?
Any ideas on other things I should look at in comparing the two services are welcomed.