How our alerts are different than Google alerts
Our last post was on why we’re different than Google search and in this post we want to discuss why our Deep Web alerts are different than Google Alerts.
Learn what alerts we can set up, how they’re different than a Google Alert, and examples of how BrightPlanet’s Deep Web alerts can be used.
- Page Changes vs. Mentions
- Customizable Emails vs. Generic
- Near Real-Time vs. Recurring
- BrightPlanet Deep Web Alerts at Work
Page Changes vs. Mentions
Google indexes billions of webpages and sends alerts based on any new pages that may contain a mention of your selected keywords or phrases. Google Alerts does a very good job at trying to monitor the surface web for new webpages. However, Google’s alerting service will never send an alert on pages that already exist within their index, only new pages. This means pages that didn’t previously contain your specific keywords will never be found via Google’s alerting service. BrightPlanet’s Deep Web alerts are meant to tackle a completely different problem.
Oftentimes you know the pages or website you want to monitor and you want to be alerted when it changes and what is changing. BrightPlanet’s technology harvests the content from specific webpages that you choose and sends alerts when any textual changes have been made on those specific pages. The harvests and alerts can be scheduled and sent every minute to every week depending on what you would like.
Examples of why this is valuable:
- Monitor and track textual changes to your own corporate website
- Monitor government filings and alert yourself to changes in near real-time
- Track your competitor’s product literature and be alerted when new features are added
- Monitor when news stories on sites get changed or updated
If the user prefers, BrightPlanet’s technology can also monitor specific parts of pages; the entire page does not need to be harvested every time. For example, if you just wanted to track the “Events” section of you favorite organization’s website, you could receive email alerts every time just that section was changed.
Customizable Emails vs. Generic
Google Alert emails have a generic layout that is used for every user. The alerts sent by BrightPlanet are customizable. Everything from the title to the content can be customized for the specific user.
At its simplest, BrightPlanet’s alert emails include past versions of the monitored page’s content and the new versions of the pages content with the specific content that was modified highlighted. This ability to pick specific sections of pages to harvest allows you to be alerted if specific relevant portions of pages are modified.
Near Real-Time vs. Recurring
Google Alerts are sent on a daily basis and BrightPlanet’s Deep Web alerts can be sent in near real-time. An email alert can be sent within 60 seconds of a page change. If the user prefers, the alerts can be sent on a recurring basis they specify, but the technology has the ability to send them in near real-time unlike Google Alerts.
BrightPlanet Deep Web Alerts at Work
To illustrate the use of BrightPlanet’s Deep Web alerts we set up the technology to monitor changes made to an inventory of a car dealership.
Car Dealership Inventory
We set up our Deep Web alerts to harvest the inventory page of a car dealership. The campaign was set up to send daily alerts showing the changes that have been made to the page. A competitor could use this to know what has been added to the lot and purchased.
Below you will find screengrabs of email alert portions. The top screengrab shows the text for a car that was removed highlighted in red; presumed sold. The bottom two screengrabs show cars that were added to the inventory page highlighted in green.
This is a very entry-level Deep Web alert. The alerts just contain the text from the specific page with the modifications highlighted. As we mention above, these e-mail alerts can be customized based on your needs.
Want to learn more?
If you are interested in learning more about the potential to implement Deep Web alerts in your organization, sign up for a free consultation with one of our Data Acquisition Engineers.
//
