A Human View of Current Awareness

Current awareness has been on my mind recently as I begin the New Year. Most people pick up a free newspaper on the train or bus, or listen to the radio, and it's apparent than many rely on Facebook. Not the highest quality or most reliable sources.

High quality current awareness services are only available to professionals. It’s normally provided by in-house information specialists to scholars, lawyers, doctors and others. But in my view, everyone is entitled to quality low cost alerts from a trustworthy curator.

How to set up an advanced Google alert

Google Alerts are emails sent to you when Google finds new results, such as web pages, newspaper articles, or blogs that match your search term(s). You can use Google Alerts to monitor anything on the Web. For example,

· find out what is being said about their company or product
· monitor a developing news story
· keep up to date on a competitor or industry
· find out if a particular person has been mentioned

Many of you will have set up Google alerts on topics, people, events and it occurred to me that you might not be aware of the useful features on there. It may be that the search is too broad, or the location isn’t specific enough or you may even feel that you want to narrow the source to one website.

· Go to the advanced search 
· Fill in the boxes as required and click search
· Click on the link to create the search alert and follow the instructions, filling in the box as required.
· Ensure you have the right email account – you will be asked to verify the alert.

For more information generally on advanced Google searching.

Updated 1/8/13
Worrying developments regarding Google Alerts have been mentioned here 'Google Alerts' Are Broken