I've been monitoring some keywords via Google Alerts and it doesn't seem to pick up anything published about those keywords. Every once in a while I get alerts but they're not very related and definitely not covering all the mentions of the keywords that I know for a fact have been published every day! Is Google Alerts dead?!
It's been low-quality for a long time, but I haven't noticed much dropoff lately. (Back in 2013, the links were actually increasing for me: <a href="https://gwern.net/google-alerts" rel="nofollow">https://gwern.net/google-alerts</a> )
I do see some results from a fairly long list of Google Alerts every day, some good, some not, so I don't think that Google Alerts have completely failed, at least not for me. I do ask to see All Results, not just Best Results, and I check off all the boxes for sources to check, and I have a fairly long list and a fair number of those almost never report any results, as expected. I have it report at most once a day.<p>But, having watched that list of Alerts for a fairly long time, I am guessing that search and search engine optimization have evolved over time and my list of Alerts and my skill at writing excellent Alerts has not kept up. I will now and then see an Alert mail which consists of a long list of hits where the title of each web page pretty clearly shows that page has little or nothing to do with what I'm monitoring for, instead likely someone has stuffed a few keywords somewhere in the page to get their page to show up in Google searches. I don't know whether limiting my Alerts to Best Results might help overcome this or not.<p>Having thought about this, I think I see that I need to hone my skills and find an excellent resource which will train me to craft much better Alerts. I think skill at writing excellent Alerts is somewhat different from the skill at writing excellent Google searches. There should be an excellent resource out there somewhere to train people to do this. If there was any way to get good feedback on the quality of an Alert that would be very valuable.<p>If anyone is aware of something like this then please leave a note here. I had intended to post a question exactly like this to HN, but had not yet done so. Thanks for any assistance.
I don't know if this is related but I have a gmail account I seem to only occasionally get updates for. That is to say it seems there's a delay between gmail's servers receiving an email and that email being sent to my client, usually days up to a couple weeks and updates happen all at once; just the other day I had 18 emails come in at one time rather than trickling in over a week or two.<p>In this case, it's an old account which doesn't see any outbound email traffic (I do still get inbound messages which I actually want, newsletters and such); I wonder if account activity has an effect on the urgency with which said account's notifications are delivered. The problem otherwise sounds similar except with alerts instead of mail. They also sound dissimilar because you seem to be missing things which you know you shouldn't, even after receiving updates (and it's alerts instead of mail). I would only really consider them as possibly related because of the G commonality.<p>Just some anecdata in case it's helpful.