Exclude specific news sites from Google News search alert

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.

If you work for a newspaper covering Lynchburg, Virginia, and you have a Google alert for “Lynchburg,” 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.

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