Web-savvy journalists use Google News alerts and/or RSS feeds to scour the Web for news related to their beat that pops up on sites they typically wouldn’t read. Here’s a quick tip for refining the results.
You may already be familiar with Google News e-mail alerts (and RSS feeds). If not, here’s a primer.
For journalists, the best way to use them is by clicking “Sort By Date” after searching Google News but before signing up for the e-mail alert. That way you always get the newest information, and you can sort out what’s relevant to you.
The techniques available to refine regular Google search results are also available for Google News alerts. That means you can refine your news alert terms by excluding sources you already read or don’t trust.
If you work for a newspaper covering Ankeny, Iowa, and you have a Google alert for “Ankeny,” you’ll probably be bombarded with news alerts from your own paper. Since you’ll already be familiar with those stories, these alerts will be useless.
In Google searches, you can restrict a search to a specific site using the following:
searchterm site:domain.com
For example,
"City Council" site:newsadvance.com
to search for “City Council” only on www.newsadvance.com.
Similarly, you can exclude specific sites by adding a minus sign before the site parameter, like
"Lynchburg" -site:newsadvance.com
By using “-site:newsadvance.com,” I will exclude www.newsadvance.com from search results for “Lynchburg.” This is OK because I work for www.newsadvance.com and am already familiar with its stories.
After turning that search result into an e-mail alert, I won’t be hit with lots of e-mails about stories from my own paper.
Did you find this helpful? Do you have any questions about using Google News alerts? Please leave a comment!
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I couldn’t get this to work. I can specify a site to include (e.g. site:guardian.co.uk), but i can’t specify a site to exclude (e.g. -site:dailymail.co.uk). Google News just returns “Your search – -site:dailymail.co.uk – did not match any documents.”
Any ideas how I can get this to work?
Hi Dan,
Did you put in a search term as well? Like:
London -site:dailymail.co.uk
If you only put in “-site:dailymail.co.uk” it won’t work. You need a search term too.
Hope that helps!
I used -source:financial_times
It works with the ‘-’ to remove the source or without the ‘-’ to only include the given source and exclude all others (ie. source:financial_times will give you only news from ft.com).
I have no problems with the information provided by ft.com but they only allow you to view one story per month with out paying for a subscription. With all the news sources available I don’t need their stories that bad.