Google has a free but surprisingly little known tool that was launched in 2004. The Google Alert is an amazing and incredible people finding tool. It worked for me when I was trying to locate my birth son whom I had not seen in twenty-four years.

Let’s take a closer look at this exciting tool! A Google Alert is simply an email notification that lists the latest and most relevant information found in web pages, blogs, and just about everywhere on the Internet. The Google search spiders find the most relevant results in the top 20 search results and notifies you with links to those results.

So how can this help you with a person search?
Let me tell you how it worked for me. I wasn’t sure of the exact name of my birth son but I did have eight possible names. I set up an alert with each of those names. It turned out to be very valuable information.

So many people have never heard of this powerful too and those who do aren’t too sure how to use it. Here’s the steps to setting up your own Google Alert:

Go to http://www.google.com/alerts

In the “Create a Google Alert” box on the right, insert your keyword in quotes, i.e. “John Doe”. Use the quotes to help ensure relevant results.

Select the Type of alert (news, web, blog, video, groups or comprehensive). I chose comprehensive because I wanted to be alerted to a name regardless of where it was found.

Select frequency for receiving your alerts. I chose “as it happens” so that as soon as Google found my search terms, I was notified.

Enter your e-mail address and that’s it! Usually within 24 hours you will start getting alerts if there are any. The thing that you have to remember is that you will only get results from what Google has in the top 20 search results for your keyword. If you are searching for someone with a common name, you may have to refine your search with some other terms. You may want to add a state outside of the quotations to limit your search results if you are getting too many and they are not relivant.

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Filed under: People Searches

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