Set up alerts to notify you when search engines find new content mentioning your project, local area, or topics of interest to you.

Complexity: 1/5

Every day search engines are looking for new content on the internet - and they are pretty good at finding new documents, pages and content quickly.

A search alert is a way of making sure that as soon as a search engine knows about new content that matches a search you are interested in that you know about it too.

You can set up some search alerts to let you know about new content by e-mail. Other search alerts deliver information through RSS - ideal for plugging into your listening dashboard.

The first stage in setting up any alert is to choose your search terms. For example, for alerts about Youth Participation in Oxford you might use the search terms:

youth participation "oxford city" -university

This looks for articles, blogs or news which contain the words youth and participation, and which have 'oxford city' as a single phrase (so it would avoid things like “youth participation project in Oxford Street, City of London”) - and it removes anything which is about the Universities. (For more on advanced searching take a look at Google's help pages).

Test out your chosen terms on the search engine you are planning to set up alerts from - or try different combinations of terms so that the majority of the items returns on the first page are broadly relevant to your interests.

Then you need to set up the alert itself:

Google Alerts are easy to set-up as either e-mail alerts or an RSS feed.

Simply visit the Google Alerts website and enter the search terms you want to get alerts for. Choose whether you want alerts for mentions in blogs, news or any website, and set the frequency of alerts you want to receive.

You can change or cancel your alerts at any time.

• One page guide to Google Alerts (printable PDF)

When you search on Google News you will see an option in the left-hand column to get an RSS feed of your search results.

You can take the RSS feed from here, and add it to an RSS Reader or to your Listening Dashboard so that whenever Google News identifies new stories which fit your search, you will see those in your listening dashboard.

You may need to go back and update the search terms you have been using if you find you are getting too much irrelevant content, or you're not getting enough information coming through your alerts.

Your alerts may include a link to edit their settings - or you can just remove them and set a new one up.

Remember: no search will be perfect - and you will still need to skim through and ignore some of the items that your alerts include.

See the Listening Dashboard pages for details on responding to information in your alerts.

Inbox Listening combines the idea of a Listening Dashboard and e-mail search alerts.

Visit http://www.inboxlistening.com/ and update the settings to define search terms on news search sites, blog search and twitter search, and to get the results of those searches regularly e-mailed to you.

You can limit your search alerts to just cover content on a particular website by adding 'site:domainname.com' to your Google search. For example:

"open weekend" dcsf site:bebo.com

This will search all the public pages on that site which fit this term and which have been indexed by Google.