The Oddly Addictive Quality of Google Alerts (newyorker.com) 7
The imperfect, scattershot search tool delivers just enough usefulness and serendipity to keep one hooked. From a report: Google Alerts can cast a wonderful net, but mesh size matters: large holes and it catches nothing, too small and it catches everything. Consider the earliest and one of the most persistent reasons for setting these alerts: tracking yourself. All is vanity, perhaps especially on the Internet, so it's no surprise that one of the things that we're most eager to know is what the world is saying about us. The engineer who developed the alert system for Google told CNN that when he first presented the idea, twenty years ago, his manager was skeptical, worrying that it would starve the search-engine of traffic: rather than consumers constantly searching for fresh mentions of whatever topic interested them, they would wait for the alert, then follow its links not to Google but to outside Web sites, leaching away potential advertising revenue. In response, the engineer, one of the first forty or so employees of the company, took his prototype to Google's co-founders, who approved it after watching him demonstrate only two search terms: "Google" and "Larry Page," the name of one of the co-founders.
Learning what other people thought about us used to take either a great deal of luck, like Tom Sawyer being mistaken for dead and then getting to eavesdrop on his own funeral, or a great deal of effort, like Harun al-Rashid, a caliph of the Abbasid dynasty, in the "Arabian Nights," disguising himself in order to venture out into the streets and talk with his subjects candidly. But the Internet has made it easy -- made it, in fact, almost unavoidable. The same Google Alert can make sure you know that your long-lost bunkmate from summer camp has mentioned you in an essay, that a friend of your deceased uncle has written a memoir of their time together in the Marines (including the care packages you sent them), and that the local newspaper has digitized its archives, thereby offering up to the Internet your high-school football averages and your arrest for vandalism.
Learning what other people thought about us used to take either a great deal of luck, like Tom Sawyer being mistaken for dead and then getting to eavesdrop on his own funeral, or a great deal of effort, like Harun al-Rashid, a caliph of the Abbasid dynasty, in the "Arabian Nights," disguising himself in order to venture out into the streets and talk with his subjects candidly. But the Internet has made it easy -- made it, in fact, almost unavoidable. The same Google Alert can make sure you know that your long-lost bunkmate from summer camp has mentioned you in an essay, that a friend of your deceased uncle has written a memoir of their time together in the Marines (including the care packages you sent them), and that the local newspaper has digitized its archives, thereby offering up to the Internet your high-school football averages and your arrest for vandalism.
Bad opsec (Score:2)
Addictive? (Score:2)
I think not. At least not if you don't have a malignantly overgrown ego.
Get a high level security clearance. Our counterintelligence services will perform essentially the same services for you. Just to make sure you are not the target of blackmail or some other disinformation campaign. And from time to time, they sit you down and go over all the b*llsh* that they have uncovered. Most of it is just busy-body crap initiated by the neighborhood crazy lady. And I could really care less. Pretty soon, I just say
What? (Score:2)
I never gave a fuck what others think or say about me.
Who actually uses it? (Score:2)
May be a useful tool for a few people but judging by the /. response it is of extremely low general interest.
Me, I can't stand useless notifications and alerts. Not a twitter fan and I disable all web notifications. Seems to me these alerts are just black hole time wasters, except for very limited and specific circumstances.
Re: (Score:1)
I use it with a handful of search phrases. Most usefully, the name of the district of the city I live in - it's pretty unique, and tells me when there are news articles that affect my neighborhood. The other one is the name of an open source web app I work on - it's not widely used, and if someone uses it publicly, I often find out that way.
Re: (Score:2)
Makes sense. Useful niche tool. Slow news day.