Google Alerts aren’t very alert
May 4, 2011 Google Alerts No CommentsGoogle Alerts is, in theory, a fantastic service. You just type in a phrase you want to receive alerts about and each day you receive an email giving you a range of links related to that search phrase.
At the most basic level people use it to keep an eye out for when their company or product name are referred to online. At the next level it’s useful for keeping an eye on what people are saying about particular subjects.
But at its core, Google Alerts is just maths in the same way that all of the Google system is and the screenshot below, which I’ll go on to explain, demonstrates this quite well …
That Google Alert was set up to pick up on the phrase ‘analysing website visitors’ and it gave 5 results. Here are the links to those results …
http://www.articlesandarticles.com/analyzing-web-site-site-visitors/
http://freearticlestoread.com/marketing-promotion/analyzing-web-site-visitors.htm
http://ezine.sbr23.com/?p=66760
http://goarticles.com/article/Analyzing-Website-Site-visitors/4560522/
If you clicked on any of those links you’d get an article that provides a very basic level insight into analysing website visitors (my 1 year old boy could dream up better!) and you’ll find many examples of poor grammar.
Clicking on another link (any one) you’ll get a feeling of déjà vu as the content is very familiar with the only difference being some words are changed around. So, same rubbish article changed around slightly.
And it goes on – if you looked at any of those other links you’d get the same.
For those who aren’t familiar with why this happens an explanation is worth making …
Those articles all originated from one article and it’s been taken and tweaked about slightly (sometimes human changed but in this case the mistakes are so bad I’m assuming it’s been machine generated), and then uploaded to various online presences over and over. The purpose of doing this is so that people who go to those articles may click on the numerous forms of paid advertising that are within and around the articles, which generates revenues for the site owner who gets a proportion of the click value (or sometimes a proportion of an eventual sale of something, if that happens).
The purpose of this blog isn’t to go into the potentially huge discussion about how much rubbish there is on the Internet but is about Google Alerts itself. The system has been asked to pick up on articles related to the phrase ‘analysing website visitors’ and it’s done that quite literally. What its failed to do is realise that the articles are all the same, slightly amended and unfortunately, it happens quite a lot.
It means that the person receiving the Google Alerts has to initially waste time assessing the potential value of those links instead of feeling that unique content will be delivered. The Google system clearly isn’t as clever as it needs to be. Maybe it should be renamed Google Asleep.