Why use Google Alerts and Google Reader? Many other tools for tracking topics online are more powerful. In particular, tools like Reddit, socialmention and Spy provide so many options for looking for topics and updates to them, and it also helps that all these tools have a social element to them.

And yet, many people still do use both Google Alerts and Reader. In face, most professionals will mention one or both as enduringly great tools, especially for beginners.

Alerts + Reader

The advantage to using Alerts and Reader together is convenience. Both tools are simple, so they’re easy to setup and use regularly. Connecting them together means you would only have to go to one place to do all your research. But then, you would ask, why do you need both at all? To answer this ,we need to find out how each works and where they get their content.

Alerts is the single most popular change detection and notification service. Change detection services crawl webpages to frequently check for updates. Because Alerts not only uses information collected by Googlebots, it also notifies you directly about these changes on a regular basis. it’s remained a very powerful tool, one that’s smoked all its competitors out of the water. For many people, Alerts is the only service of its kind that they know.

In the meantime, Google Reader gets content from RSS feeds. Again, Google Reader is not the only service of its kind, but it does its job well enough. Google has done well to replicate all RSS reader functionality on a cloud-hosted application. Recent changes to the service have incorporated its social aspect to Google Plus completely.

But then, you may ask, wouldn’t you miss out on content in the meantime? There are blog posts that get indexed in Google but don’t make it to Reader. For example, there are blogs that use OAuth or push notifications instead of RSS.

My answer to this objection is, that’s OK. You will get most of the content, and likely the most relevant information. You can safely rely on Google’s algorithm to provide. Furthermore, thanks to the social nature of blogging itself, if you don’t get a story first, you’re bound to get it later, as people freely share links and information around.

Setting up Alerts

Furthermore, the sites that don’t have a system like OAuth or RSS to follow them will be tracked down by Alerts.

Fortunately, Google Alerts and Reader have been completely incorporated, so the process is painless.

From the Google Alerts page, you choose your options to the following drop down menus:

• Search query
• Result type: Everything, News, Blogs, Video, Discussions, Books
• How often: As-it-happens, Once a day, Once a week
• How many: Only the best results, All the results

When you get to the “Deliver to:” drop down menu, you choose to receive your alerts either via your Gmail address or feed. When you choose feed, it will automatically go to your Google Reader.

Subsequently, if you have any existing feeds, switching from email to Google Reader is easy to. You click on Manage your alerts, click on edit, and once again select on the “Deliver to:” drop down menu to switch from email to Reader and vice versa.

When you have Alerts incorporated to Google Reader, research for topics is made considerably easy. You need only check your Reader once a week (for more viral topics, everyday) to see whatever new websites, blog posts, videos or other content show up, and you will stay up to date. You’ve cut down the time needed going to several websites, time you could spend writing or no longer working.

Other services for finding content

For most people, using Alerts and Reader will be all that they need, but for specialized needs, or power users, the other services I mentioned earlier (Spy, socialmention, and Reddit) will cover whatever other needs you may have.

I would also recommend using other Google Services, for all the specialized uses they have. For example, if you look up a company in Google Finance, it won’t just give you it’s stock performance, but also the latest financial news for said company. Google Image search will help you identify any image you may have, as well as find the creator of the image and/or the source for said post. And Google Plus ranks posts and articles based on how social they’ve become in G +, adding a social aspect to Google Search results.

What other services would you recommend? Feel free to share us in the comments.

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