Google Now Offering News Alerts

We now pause for me to do a happy dance. Cue the Snoopy music!

All right, why am I happy dancing? Because Google is finally offering news alerts, which may finally fill the giant hole left in my life by the demise of Northern Light News and THEIR alerts. You can get to 'em at http://www.google.com/newsalerts.

Apparently you will not have to have an account for this. All the site offers is a space for you to enter a news query, a note for how often you want it (daily or as it happens) and your e-mail. Once you've entered a query Google News will send you a confirmation of that query. Confirm that and you'll start getting news alerts. Alerts contain links to storie containing your alert keywords as relevant "snippets" of the stories.

There are limits. It doesn't appear that you can edit an alert, either the query itself or the address to which it goes. Instead you'll need to delete the alert and start over with the new one. (Each alert e-mail comes with instructions for deleting that alert.) You may have a maximum of fifty alerts per e-mail address. There's a FAQ for the News Alerts at http://www.google.com/help/faq_newsalerts.html and a Usenet discussion group at google.public.labs.newsalerts.

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