The Internet is a big place and there are times when you want to know about something as quickly as it has happened. This can be news about a specific company, a person or a technology. You want to know everything as it happens.

How can you do that? Well apart from scouring the Internet and/or tracking people via Friendfeed or Twitter or any other social sites/aggregators, there is some help out there. It is Google centric, but then Google is most of the Internet these days. The tool is Google Alerts.

Google Alerts offers you a mechanism to create a Google Search as you would via the standard dialogue box, but this search fires either once a day or continuously as Google indexes all those web sites, and sends you the information in either an email or via an RSS feed (a new feature by the way, which I have not got into yet).  

The secret is in picking the right search phrase, exactly as the issue is with Google Search. This in fact points you into how to optimise your search, by setting the search to deliver the right information and then taking a copy of what is in the search bar and placing it in the alert as you set it up.

As I said, the search can fire once a day or as the index is made. I find that latter as being best for the sorts of information I track, which is mainly specific key individuals in my industry or specific companies. This also points to one of the best uses of this service – following your online reputation.

Set yourself up a Google Alert with keyphrases that match your name and/or normal handle. You will get some false positives (particularly if you have a more common name) but this is worth it to track if anyone is posting some old rubbish about you or your company, or both. This is an invaluable service.

The only downsides are the time taken to read the posts, the fact that there can be a lag between info being published and the notification getting to you, and also the degree of false positives that you have to deal with. I also use it for various members of my own family, and this has proven very worthwhile during a time when a relative was having false nasty posts being made in their name, and also when the local paper published some photos of my children – managed to get the photos notified to relatives before the newspaper had even officially published them

So get out there and use this valuable service to find what you need to know, and protect your reputation online.