google alert

1. Track Your Company. I have a Google Alert running for "HubSpot" so I know when new content is published about our company. You should too.
2. Track Your Products. I have alerts set up for "Website Grader" and "Press Release Grader". This is a good way to stay informed about how many bloggers are writing about HubSpot's products. If you have products with different names than your company, set up alerts for them too.
3. Track Your Executives. I have alerts set up for "Brian Halligan" and "Dharmesh Shah", so I can keep tabs on blogs and news articles that mention the HubSpot co-founders. You can do the same for your executives.
4. Use Phrase Search. If your company, products of executives have more than one word names, you should use phrase search in the alert - just put quotes around the search term and Google will only match on the phrase. For instance, an alert for "Website Grader" works better with quotes, because without the quotes it would pick up an article with the line "websites built by fifth graders", for instance.
5. Use Negative Keywords. Google Alerts will actually track new results for any search terms, including advanced terms. For instance, there is a political blogger named Mike Volpe, and to keep my email from getting cluttered with results that are about him and not me, I use the search "mike volpe -proprietornation" as an alert (the other Volpe's blog is called proprietornation, so using the negative search term excludes almost all of the results about the other Mike Volpe from my alert).
6. Use Other Advanced Search Terms. Pretty much any advanced search in Google can also be used as an alert. So check out the article "12 Tips to Search Google Like an Expert" and try out some of those tips as a Google Alert, or use the Google Advanced Search page to experiment - http://www.google.com/advanced_search

Google Alerts is a service offered by search engine company Google which notifies its users by email (or as a feed) about the latest web and news pages of their choice.

Google currently offers six types of alert searches: "News", "Web", "Blogs", "Comprehensive", "Video" and "Groups". A News alert is an email that lets the user know if new articles make it into the top ten results of his/her Google News search. A Web alert is an email that lets the user know if new web pages appear in the top twenty results for his/her Google Web search. A News & Web alert is an email that lets the user know when new articles related to his/her search term make it into the top ten results for a Google News search or the top twenty results for a Google Web search. A Groups alert is an email that lets the user know if new posts make it into the top fifty results of his/her Google Groups search.

Google Alerts also allow its users to determine the frequency in which checks are made for new results. Three options are available: "once a day", "once a week", or "as it happens". These options do not necessarily control how often they will receive alerts. The first option, for example, means they will receive at most one alert email per day. The "as it happens" option can result in many alert emails per day, depending on the search.

Google Alerts are available in plain text as well as HTML. In October 2008 Google also made alerts available as RSS feeds.