Google alerts, which are email notification on new sites being added to the google index for a certain query, broke these days. Seems like they just “upgraded” their software.

The alerts are still sent, however they list web pages that don’t match the query. For example, my alert on “layered-subversion svn” just turned up some generic hits with “svn” “subversion” and “layered” in them.

A pity. I really liked this function, but it’s not too useful anymore now. I hope they fix that again.

[Update May/5: todays alert mails had only correct results.]

It’s also a shame that there are some restrictions with google on combining e.g. site: and link: matches. Especially with negative prefix… For example I’d like to see all links to my homepage, but not those from my blog. You can do that with Altavista, MSN search, for example. Exalead also gives much more valueable search results than Google…