 |
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Toward a Better Computing Experience | Tom Thiel, Programs Director, Lake-Sumter Computer Society, Florida www.lscs.us/ tthiel5 (at) comcast.net |
I do. I have Google search all sorts of things for me—material for my Taro Leaf publication of the 24th Infantry Division Association, personal things, family obituaries for my family tree—all sorts of very helpful items.
It’s with Google Alerts. Let me explain.
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:
monitoring a developing news story
keeping current on a competitor or industry
getting the latest on a celebrity or event
keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams
Interested? It’s really quite simple. Here’s how.
Open Google, i.e., www.google.com. Click on “more.” And then on “even more.” Google Alerts is the first entry under the Search products listing. Click on it, and you will see the form shown below.
Place your search term in the first box, “Search terms.” That can be, in my case: “Thiel +obituary” or ‘“24th infantry division” +obituary” or “Lake Sumter Computer Society” as examples.
Type offers you six choices: News, Blogs, Web, Comprehensive, Video and Groups. I use Comprehensive for all of mine.
For How often, you can select from: as-it-happens, once a day, or once a week. Most of mine are as-it-happens.
For the Your email block you may enter any valid email address, it does not have to be Gmail.
With my Gmail Google Alerts, it also gives an option of email or feed. I have never used feed.
Well, what might you expect when you send in your Google Alert? The two figures below are two examples of my Gmail inboxes.
The two “Orians +obituary” hits highlighted near the bottom of the above figure pointed me to the obituary of my third cousin, Rev. Father David M. Orians, 57, of Newark, OH, who died Monday, Oct. 26, 2009. I did not know David, but a quick Legacy Family Tree index search revealed that he was indeed in my list of Orians family members. So, I now have much new information to add to my genealogy family file, albeit, as a secondary source.
I also am editor of the Taro Leaf publication of the 24th Infantry Division Association, which is a quite nice glossy 48-page +/- that is sent to 2,200 members every quarter. As such, I am always looking for materials to publish, especially, TAPS notices of our members, historical or feature articles, and sometimes just filler materials.
The Google Alert near the middle of the above figure was the obituary of Association member, Norman Treadway. Clicking on it reveals the listing below, and clicking on that took me to the actual obituary, which I copied to the clip board and used “paste special” to paste it either into a Word or Publisher file in the format of the receiving document. This latter is convenient and very time-saving. Treadway’s obituary is below and it is followed by the actual TAPS notice.
The list below is a partial listing of all 24th-related Alerts I have operational. Actually, as I was doing this article, I thought of even a few more “Task Force Smith” for one.
So, there you have it!
The magic of Google Alerts. For the last issue I found a 10 or so page history of the 24th Infantry division that after a wee bit of reformatting and placing into columnar format nicely filled five published pages.
Alerts really work for me as I never would be able to remember to do each search once a day, and they work while I’m doing other things.
Bet it would work for you too. Try it.
This article has been obtained from APCUG with the author’s permission for publication by APCUG member groups; all other uses require the permission of the author (see e-mail address above).