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July 8, 2006

Testing Google Alerts

Posted by Sarah King in Search Engine Optimisation

A couple of days before the launch of WDANZ I thought I’d use the opportunity to analyse how effective Google Alerts are. I wanted to test the breadth of indexing and how quickly the reactions of bloggers might be picked up.

In the table below you can see how Google indexed the sites talking about this breaking news item.

Curiously, the reports seem to be out of date - the ComputerWorld example is the best - by the time the alert comes through the story had been buried in the archives.

This doesn’t spell doom for Google’s alerts - where they can direct you to a permalink - but it does render the homepage alerts virtually worthless.

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