Alternatives to Google Alerts

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One of Google's most interesting and difficult to replace functions is Google Alerts. This is why today we want to look for some alternatives to Google Alerts.

First of all, what is it for? Google Alerts? It is a news alert service. It means you can choose a word, phrase or topic and receive an email alert (and remember to do not use Gmail!) when news and/or an article about it comes out.

A useful service

A very useful service for those who want to stay up to date, perhaps on news on a specific topic or also useful for any statistics (Wired, for example, used it to count murders in Italy in 2019).

Like all Google services (Google's privacy policy is always the same), in exchange for a free service Google would like get to know you as much as possible. It will therefore take into account your searches, your alerts and will be able to use them to add them to all those it already has on you for better profiling.

Google Alerts vs Talkwalker Alert

So here we are with the choice of alternatives to Google Alerts. In this case, unfortunately, we have not found or know anything open-source or completely reliable when it comes to privacy.

But we have found an alternative and it's called Talkwalker Alert. Although we struggled to find it their privacy policy and this is not in favor of their transparency.

However, we think that even in the case of imperfect privacy, the fragmentation of our data is a good and right thing. What does it mean? That if we really need this service for 'n' reasons it is probably better not to give away all the data together to a single company but to diversify everything so as to give the least complete picture possible to anyone.

So welcome Talkwaler Alert. We have been using it successfully for several months by monitoring what happens in a certain street in our city and it seems to work very well. Every time news breaks, we are immediately notified via email.

F5Bot

Open source

After long searches we succeeded finally to find something Open source that can somehow replace the work of Google Alerts. We found F5Bot. This service will search for the word or phrase you decide only on the networks of Reddit, Hacker News or Lobsters. A little limited for sure but it could be useful to someone. It's not a given that it will stay that way forever. Being Open source anyone can participate And New sites could also be added further on. The service is active on the site f5bot.com. Their privacy policy it's good and no data is sold to third parties.

What do you think about it? Use the service of Google Alerts and you are going to give it a chance Talkwalker Alert?

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