Never miss a chance to be cited.

Google Alerts follows what Google has indexed, days late and with very partial coverage of forums — many threads never make it into the index.

We read the forums' own public feeds, every four hours. No index in between: what the forum publishes, we see.

Two hours on average, four at worst. Each forum's main feed is re-read every four hours, and the email leaves within seconds of the collection.

No. We read the RSS and JSON feeds forums publish to be read by machines, we respect their robots.txt, and we never open two simultaneous requests to the same site. A forum sees two to seven visits a day from us.

We copy neither pages nor messages: only a title, a link back to the source, and the beginning of the message.

A word only counts when it appears whole. “gas” therefore triggers nothing on “magazine”.

Several words must follow one another. “internet box” will not surface a discussion mentioning “box” in one sentence and “internet” in another.

You can also rule words out, restrict to a country or a language, and any term passing fifty results is flagged as too broad rather than dumped in your inbox.

Because they are often the best ones. A question about an electricity contract asked on a Prius forum is watched by nobody — and that is exactly where an answer counts.

So we never filter on the forum's theme, only on what the discussion says.

It may not, and we will say so. Consumer energy, for instance, has almost no communities of its own — but it is discussed at length among DIYers and electricians. The right question is not “where are my sector's forums” but “where is my subject discussed without being the subject”.