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How to Create a Google Alert

By Marziah Karch, About.com

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Set up Your Google Alert Search Term

Set Up Your Search TermScreen Capture of Google Alert
The first thing to set up is your search term. Try to pick a search phrase that is fairly specific and specialized. If your term is too general and popular, such as "money" or "elections," you will end up with way too many results.

You're allowed to enter more than one word here, so try to narrow it down a little. Keep in mind that Google Alerts sends you newly indexed results, not every result available on the Web. Sometimes one word really is all you need.

In this case, we'll just use one word, "gnomes." That's obscure enough of a term that there are probably not that many new pages being indexed on a daily basis.

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