Google is making it a little easier to get an alert on your email whenever your name gets mentioned on a search engine or a site. From now on, whenever you Google yourself, the search box will show a new widget at the bottom of the first page of search results. This will help you to set up a Google Alert for your name so that you can track new references or mentions to your name. This will work as long as you are logged into Google and have allowed it to save your web and app activity.
Google Alerts have been around since 2003, but they were never trendy enough to be used extensively. In a bid to keep this feature popular, this is a smart move from the company. One would usually search his/her name on Google Search to find out the mentions. However, this new feature makes it more convenient and optimizes the results greatly for this purpose. You can fine tune settings like the email frequency, types of sources, news/site languages, locations and regions, and results you want Google to mail over to you.
When you click on the widget that says “Stay in the loop,” Google will take you to a Google Alert form with your name already in the quotation marks. Then you get to select all the settings, and once done with it, you just hit “Create Alert” and voila! This is Google Alerts providing the back end for this new tool.
In a blog post, Google revealed this feature in a screenshot before releasing it. Now the feature is live and ready to be used!
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