An Unexpected Result From Google Alerts
I have been using a tool called Google Alerts. Once you sign up for this tool Google will notify you whenever the search keyword term that you choose is found by the search engine on the web. It still says beta, but it seems ready for prime time to me.
Whenever Google finds a page that says Lillicotch they send me an email with the page location and a small snippet of the text around my keyword. Usually my email notification only contains new page(s) that I have posted, but it also helps me to find when others have mentioned me or my site or if someone has published one of my articles. I don’t have a very popular last name so I don’t see much else, but I also see mentions of a few relatives and just a few other non-related people.
Today I got an email that showed me a page that I didn’t recognize. When I looked into it I found a picture of my grandparents wedding. It was posted by a descendant of one of their close friends. They were in the wedding which is probably why they had the picture.
Most of our old family photos had not survived for me to see and so seeing this photo for the first time was a wonderful surprise. I dropped a note to my sisters and they were just as delighted. They were also able to fill in some details on who the other people were. It’s just something that I never thought I would see and something I never expected when I signed up for my alerts.
So I recommend that you check out Google Alerts. If you have a common name there may be too much information offered to sort through so you may want to use multiple keywords to filter your alerts, but the Internet is an amazing thing and Google Alerts is a good tool that I am very glad I signed up for.
[…] I have written before about how you may find some unexpected things from Google Alerts. […]
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