I have to say anecdotally that I have noticed my voluminous alerts reporting much less data. When we got TechCrunched I got a hit, but a piece in Gigaom took 4 days to hit my Google Alert. That's a fairly large web property with a good PageRank, so I'm not sure why it would take so long.
Anyways, does anyone have an alternative service they can suggest?
I'd like to recommend https://intigi.com as an alternative to Google Alerts. I'm one of the co-founders. We started building Intigi 2 years ago because we were frustrated with the limited query abilities of Google Alerts. Intigi is currently positioned for Marketers, however it's incredibly useful for anybody who wants to track online information:
Intigi gives you the power of Lucene indexed search on the newest articles on the web. You can subscribe to Intigi curated sources, or add your own RSS feeds or Twitter home timeline, and then filter results using powerful Lucene queries (fields, boosting, phrases, slop, wildcards, stop words) and other filters (social signals, word count, publishing date, presence of image or video). Intigi delivers results once per day or once per week via email, or you can view results in realtime through the web interface.
Disclaimers: I'm one of the co-founders and it's a for-pay product.
I think your product looks really cool, but doing a 30 day trial on a product like this doesn't make sense to me. I may not even be able to validate the products usefulness in 30 days.
What I would suggest is that, as a marketing professional, I have a TON of topics I'd like to monitor. Why not let me monitor 1 topic forever and then force me to pay if I want more?
I guess I'm more interested in why this isn't a freemium product. What was the thought process?
I'm another Intigi cofounder. Great point on the freemium approach.
The reason we haven't pulled the trigger on this to date is twofold. First, we're a bootstrapped startup and we've been cautious about our burn rate (e.g., scaling infrastructure before we've achieved product/market fit and a sustainable revenue model). Second, for some time our product wasn't fully self-service. We were concerned about the support issues that would come with a significant growth in our user base, especially free users, potentially outside our target market.
We've now progressed beyond these two issues, and will launch a freemium model soon, with 1 or 2 interests and cached results that are updated once or twice per day.
I'd appreciate any other feedback, and happy to answer questions by email at mjfern@intigi.com.
Looks like it's new only, and a very small sample of the web. (For example, I searched one of my existing Alerts, "Hideaki Anno interview", and it turned up nothing at all but one page on my site. Even though I have at least two pages which should match...)
Doesn't look like it. But I think someone is paying attention to that feedback form. I've submitted a lot of feedback, and saw changes that seemed to reflect my suggestions.
If you're interested in a little bit of a "roll your own" thing, we have an Open Source project called Neddick[1] that could help. It's heavily centered on RSS feeds and our real target for it is inter-enterprise use... but the RSS feeds can come from anywhere (even Google Alerts, which is actually something we use quite a bit of for our "dogfood" server). Everything is indexed and searchable using Lucene, and there's a feature for adding comments, as well as a recommender to suggest similar pieces of content.
You can also do RSS aggregation, as each "channel" can consume as many RSS feeds as you want, and then the aggregate of all the entries is itself exposed as an RSS feed.
There's also voting, tagging, a "share" feature that lets you send links via email or XMPP, etc. It also looks a lot like Reddit for some weird reason.... whistles innocently
(There's a new visual theme coming that won't look so obviously inspired by Reddit, BTW)
All of that said, we're not at a 1.0 release yet and while a LOT of stuff works, and someone could almost certainly get value from it, there are definitely bugs and things that don't yet work the way we want them to. In particular the recommendations engine is currently just the Lucene MoreLikeThis filter which is pretty naive. We have plans to roll some much more sophisticated analysis using Mahout[2] eventually, but haven't gotten there yet.
Eventually we'll have persistent searches with alerts via email and XMPP, alerts based on vote thresholds, and a whole raft of other features. It's coming together, just more slowly than we'd like.
If you want to take a look, there's a public demo server at
Sample logins are testuser0-testuser19 with password "secret".
The front-page right now is actually being fed the RSS feed from here at HN, but you'll notice it's a few days out of date. That's one of the bugs I mentioned. There's a bad piece of content coming in on one of the feeds, and it's breaking the parsing, which is currently causing it to break out of the loop that consumes the feed. Fixing that is on my TODO list for Real Soon Now, so hopefully by this weekend.
Edit: This channel is more up to date, and it is, indeed, being populated from a Google Alert. This is getting a bit meta circular now... :-)
If you wanted to use this for a more general "entire web" alerting tool, you'd have to build (or acquire) a crawler to go out and get the data. I think there might be some useful stuff in Nutch[3], Droids[4], Manifold[5] and/or Heritrix[6], but I won't swear to it.
That's the bit we're not really interested in, as we aren't trying to build a public, consumer facing app here, but a tool for use inside organizations. Still, if somebody wanted to use it that way, it could be done. Scalability would also be an issue, but I think that could be managed..
Anyways, does anyone have an alternative service they can suggest?