Google Web Alerts – Is anybody maintaining this product?

I don’t know how many of you out there use Google Alerts or how many of you actually try to get your stuff published using this system. If you are like me you may use this system to stay up to date on the topics that matter most to you.

As a content producer I have tried several times to get my reporters stories included within the Google Alert system only to be rejected time and again. I know that for their system it is all about how the information is delivered and the number of writers can also make a difference. Knowing this hasn’t made it any easier to get included.

With that said I can’t help but wonder if it is so hard to get included into the Google Alert system, why do I keep getting alerts that redirect to pages that have nothing to do with the original alerted story? How about a little quality control on the sites that are currently in the system and kick the offenders out to make room for new, quality feeds?

Online News VS. Search Engines

Billionaire investor Sam Zell recently bought Tribune Corp. for 8.2 billion. Sorry – let’s give that number the respect it deserves – 8.2 Billion dollars. Seems like a lot of money to be spending on a medium that seems to allegedly lose money with every edition. Mr. Zell claims that the newspaper business is hemorrhaging money, in part, due to the bad deals newspapers negotiated with search engines.

At a speech at Stanford Law School Mr. Zell suggested that if Google wasn’t allowed to “steal” the newspaper’s content for nothing, Google wouldn’t be nearly as profitable. Now I can’t say anything about how much money Google makes off of freely distributed news content but from my perspective, I don’t go to Google to find my news and I suspect that might be the case for others too.

Google does offer a News Alert service that emails snippets of stories to people and those snippets contain links to the full stories. Most webmasters I know go out of their way to get included in the Google Alert system as it can be profitable in terms of traffic. Does this mean that Mr. Sam Zell wants to remove their websites from the Google Alert system? If he does then I can’t see how that would be helpful to the newspaper’s website’s bottom line. Further to that point I guess it is true… you can’t teach an old dog new tricks Mr. Zell and I hope that the 8.2 Billion you dropped on this venture wasn’t your last 8.2 Billion!