Google "Related" Alerts Going Crazy
A while back I signed up for Google Alerts. In general it’s a great service and lets me know when something of interest happens and reduces the need to do regular searches to find things of interest. Some of the alerts I signed up for were “related” searches… For example, “related:slicksurface.com” tells you what pages are related to slicksurface.com.
Historically, the ‘related’ alerts would yield an alert every month or two. But the last few days I’ve been getting several per alert per day and the results they presented weren’t all that “related” - essentially Google Alerts turned into spam from Google. Needless to say, I’ve canceled all the ‘related’ alerts.
I’m not quite sure what went wrong with Google Alerts. I’m guessing they broadened their logic for what’s “related” and relaxed what qualifies for a ‘related’ Google Alert. Hopefully it will get fixed…
