“Web” alerts will become “Everything” alerts

Marcel Gordon, Product Manager of Google Alerts, sends an email as we’re walking out the door today letting us know that our trusty web alerts are changing.

You may receive more results after this change. If you find that you are getting too many results, you can change the “How often” setting to “once a day” or “once a week.” You can also change your search query. You can do this on the alerts management page (www.google.com/alerts/manage), or by removing the alert using the link at the bottom of each alert email and creating it again with different settings.

Interestingly enough, I’d bet that the reason they predict that this change will continue to serve the same results, or increase is because their results contain many more types of information, videos, forum/blog threads, news results, local business results, maps and, of course, web pages. The next step may indeed be to send videos and maps in the alerts themselves.