Oh Google

In the wake of Google's killing of Google Reader, power users now have a new fear: Are Google Alerts next?

Google Alerts is a service that allows users to receive email notifications of updated Google results for a search query or keyword. This lets users easily monitor an ongoing news story or be alerted of new stories mentioning a brand or individual. Google Alerts are actively used by marketers, social media managers, publicists, journalists and researchers. It's one of Google's oldest tools, and it's also one of the most useful — at least, when it works.

For the last few months, users have complained about the unreliable state of Google Alerts. Last month, Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan wrote about Google Alerts in a blog post entitled Google Alerts: Why Aren't You Working?. Sullivan's issue at the time was that Google Alerts was no longer notifying him about all of the various mentions across search, news and blogs for his subscribed keywords.



On Wednesday, The Financial Brand penned an open letter to Google about the state of Google Alerts, saying that the service is now "useless" to financial marketers.

At Mashable, some of our reporters and employees have also experienced issues with Google Alerts. Check out the screenshots below. The first is from November and shows an alert email appearing nearly every day. Fast forward to today and the frequency of alerts has slowed to a trickle. In fact, that reporter hasn't received an email alert for her keyword since March 5th — despite new results featuring that query appearing daily for the last two weeks.







Looking at Twitter and Google+ conversations on the subject, these don't appear to be isolated cases. Something definitely seems to be broken with the current Google Alerts system.

Why This is Worrisome
We've contacted Google for comment on the status of Google Alerts — or any ongoing issues — but haven't gotten a response at press time.

Still, this hasn't stopped users from speculating — or fearing — that this is a sign that Google plans to abandon its Google Alerts service. After all, the Google Reader warning signs started the same way — a once perfectly functioning service suddenly stopped working, and users began experiencing outages or problems.

After the Google Reader decision, some of Google's most vocal users are questioning the company's commitment to its core values.

In its open letter to Google, The Financial Brand wrote:

Google has lost touch with its core business model: search. Searching the internet is what Google is was known for, it is was what Google (once) did better than everyone else. But Google has become distracted with “Shiny New Syndrome,” wasting tremendous amounts of time and energy (yours and ours) on ideas that fall way outside the search model. And yes, that does mean Google+.

To be fair, search is much more an intrinsic part of Google's real business (advertising) than a reading service ever was. It's possible that Google Alerts is just on the fritz and that things will be back to normal soon.

And yet. The decision to close a close down Google Reader — a service users loved — is enough to make even the most vociferous Google-defenders skittish.

Hey Microsoft — want to get some serious buy-in from power users? Create an RSS Reader and a manageable alerts system for Bing.

Are Google Alerts working for you? Let us know in the comments.