Using Google Alerts to find Articles for CCL

Author: Thomas Wikman
Date: 10/4-2020

This short white paper explains how to set up Google alerts for articles of general interest to CCL as well as for the purpose of writing LTEs for the DFW area. The paper discusses search terms and search strings that work well and those that don’t work well.

Table of Contents

Using Google Alerts to find Articles for CCL. 1

Google Search and Google Alerts. 3

Google Search Operators. 3

Setting up Google Alerts. 5

Best Google Alert Search Strings for DFW.. 9

Good Search Strings for Articles of General Interest 12

Targeting high profile newspapers and magazines. 13

Google Search and Google Alerts

A Google alert is a search that will happen in the background. An email with the results will be sent to you at a time that you decide. Unlike a regular Google search, which searches all sites/pages that you specify, the Google alerts focuses on recently created pages. If you decide to get your alerts once a day, the alert email that you get will feature pages/articles that were created during the last day, not over the last 30 years as with a regular Google search. However, in your email there will be an option to view two day old and three day old pages/articles. This is obviously useful for writing a letter to the editor an LTE, since your focus is new articles, not everything that ever has been written in a newspaper. Also, you don’t need to worry about doing daily searches, you will be alerted in your email about interesting articles.

The subject of the email you will receive is “Google Alert”. If you don’t see it the next day, check your junk folder. If there wasn’t anything there either, wait until another day. To set up a Google Alert you need a Google Account. You can of course have multiple Google accounts. To create a Google Alert, you type in the search terms and search operators you want, making a search string, and then you configure the settings in case you don’t like the default settings. This will be described in the next chapter.

Google Search Operators

Most of us know how to type in words/terms into the Google search edit box. However, Google searches can be controlled in multiple ways and even “programmed”. There are a lot of search operators that you can use to make your Google search “smarter”.

The Google operators I found useful for simple Google alerts are:

· Quotes as in “search term”. This forces an exact-match search. For example, “climate change” will result in a search for the word combo “climate change”, not climate and change. You will get thousands of irrelevant results with the word “climate” and even more irrelevant results with the word “change”. “climate change” narrows it down to what you want.

· The search operator “site:…..” limits the search to a specific web site. site:dallasnews.com limits the search to www.dallasnews.com , which is Dallas Morning News. Note, don’t put quotes around the site operator (the previous was just to point out the operator). With quotes around the site operator it still seems like it works but it confuses Google search and will give you lousy results.

· The “OR” operator or the “|” operator, will return results related to either of two search terms, or both. You can also use the pipe operator “|” and I like to do that for brevity. However, the pipe operator is not officially endorsed by Google so perhaps it is possible it might stop working in the future.

· The “AND” will return only results related to both search terms. You usually don’t need it since leaving it out automatically means “AND”, but it is useful for clarity or when combining with other operators. Again, don’t put quotes around the operators. I am just doing it for clarification.

· The “()” operator you use to group multiple terms or search operators together to control how the search is executed.

Below is an example of a Google search using the site: operator and the “()” operators. The site operator in this case will limit the search to Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star Telegram. The search term is greenhouse. The “()” operator will ensure that the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star Telegram are used equally with what ever search terms follow the paranthesis.

This document lists 42 Google search operators.

https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/

Setting up Google Alerts

The first step to set up a Google alert is to go to “google.com/alerts” or “alerts.google.com”. If you need to sign into your Google account do so. If you have several Google accounts, choose one to where you don’t mind getting alerts (to your email/Gmail). If you don’t have a Google account, create one.

Next you write a search term into the Google search box displayed. It could be something simple like “EICDA” or something complex such as :

When you start typing the window will change to display the options for the alert you are about to create.

1. How often: If you view your Google account email several times a day it could be worth selecting “As it happens”, otherwise choose “At most once a day”. “At most once a week” is too seldom.

2. Sources: Most likely you would like to pick News. “Automatic” will give you alerts for a lot of other sources than news articles, including reddit, blogs, environmental websites, etc. I found that “Automatic” gave me too many irrelevant results with only about a quarter being news articles.

3. For language I suggest “English” and for region “United States”, but if you are interested in articles from around the world you could pick “Any Region”.

4. How many: I used both “Only the best results” and “All results”. I found that the difference was not big. With “Only the best results” I lost about half and but that included some relevant results. You decide the balance between getting more results overall and getting more irrelevant results.

5. Now press the “Create Alert” button

Now when you have created a Google alert you can press the settings button to configure the overall settings for your alerts. The settings button is located in the middle left of the screenshot and is surrounded by a little square. These settings will apply to all your alerts (for this account).

I found the “delivery time” setting to be useful. All your alert results will be delivered to your email at the time you specify. The default is midnight, but I chose 6:00AM. I noticed that a lot of online news articles are posted during the night and in the early morning. Therefore, you might want to have the alert delivered to you when you wake up or when you can first attend to your emails in the morning. You can also set to have all your alert results delivered in one email instead of a separate email for each alert. The different alerts will be separated in your email so you can see which alerts resulted in which results.

Best Google Alert Search Strings for DFW

When you create alerts for the purpose of writing letters to the editor of a local newspaper you would use more general search strings such as “climate change” and “renewable energy”. Search strings such as “HR 763”, and "carbon fee", “citizens climate lobby” aren’t going to give you many results. The likelihood that your local newspaper is going to write an article about HR 763 is low, but every now and then there’s an article related to climate change, or extreme weather, or carbon taxes.

I did an experiment using the following 21 search strings applied to the Dallas Morning News, the Fort Worth Star Telegram and the Houston Chronicle over ad 8 day period and I got the following results. With “relevant”, I mean that it was an article or other item that possibly could be a reason for writing an LTE. With “irrelevant” I mean that it does not concern us. For example, the search string “energy” will generate a lot of alert results corresponding to articles talking about the energy in a basketball game and the search string “environment” will generate a lot of results corresponding to articles talking about the toxic environment at a firm with an awful management. The reason I did this experiment using Google alerts rather than using Google search is because they are not the same thing and with a Google search you get a lot of results reaching back decades. However, the Google searches I did pretty much confirmed my Google alert results.

Search string	Relevant results	Irrelevant results
"climate change"	58	2
"greenhouse gases"	13	0
"carbon fee"	0	0
"carbon tax"	2	0
"carbon tariff"	0	0
"renewable energy"	13	2
"air pollution"	8	5
"global warming"	10	0
"climate emergency"	1	0
"nuclear energy"	1	0
sustainability	2	2
pollution	21	23
renewable	16	4
greenhouse	8	0
IPCC	0	0
climate	45	21
environment	35	155
energy	48	133
"climate around(3) weather"	0	0
"climate around(3) environment"	0	0
"climate around(3) extreme"	0	0

I picked “climate change”, “greenhouse gases”, “renewable energy”, “global warming”, greenhouse as much search terms. You may wonder why not pick all of them? If you get too many irrelevant alerts it will be time consuming to sift through it. For the case of a search term that rarely generates a result I noticed another problem. Too many search terms in a search string tend to result in the search terms being less effective. If you keep adding low frequency search terms to a long search string, you’ll get fewer not more results. I don’t why, but another issue is that a very long search string becomes difficult to manage and you can easily make typos. An alterative is of course to create several alerts with shorter search strings. Using several alerts requires more effort but if you really want to use a lot of search terms you could do it that way.

This means that I ended up using the following search strings:

Or better

(site:dallasnews.com OR site:star-telegram.com) "climate change" OR "greenhouse gases" OR "renewable energy" OR "global warming" OR greenhouse

I recommend one of the two latter search strings. The first one seems to work almost exactly like the other two. However, the parenthesis guarantees that all the search terms will be applied to the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Telegram the same way. I checked this by transposing them. For the first search string, even though the search terms were applied to both newspapers it didn’t appear to be applied equally. I was close but not the same. Again the “OR” and pipe operator works the same, but the pipe operator isn’t officially endorsed. About the "climate around(3) weather" search term, the search operator around(X) means that Google looks for the words “climate” and “weather” located within X words from each other. I didn’t investigate this search operator enough, but I didn’t have much luck with the little I did.

Suggested Google Alerts for Articles of General Interest

Creating Google alerts for articles of general interest from anywhere in the country is a different situation. Hundreds of articles and pages concerning climate change are created every day. You just want the ones most relevant to CCL. Search terms that never generate alerts and search terms that generate a lot of irrelevant alerts should not be used unless you are willing to spend a lot of time with your alerts. Naturally, in this case you may not want to use the “site:” operator. By using Google search and alerts over certain time periods I generated statistics, which I used to create lists of effective search terms. Over an 8 day period I recorded the number of alerts results I got for the different search terms below. I did not use the “News” (only) option for these alerts but that would have been better. The results are in the table below.

	Very Relevant	Relevant	Irrelevant
"Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend"	2	5	0
"HR 763"	5	11	0
"carbon fee"	9	27	0
"carbon tax"	27	175	10
"citizens climate lobby"	27	50	0
"climate change"	2	1043	0
"James Hansen"	1	13	9
IPCC	4	105	53

With “Very Relevant” I mean news articles or op-eds that discuss carbon fee and dividend, HR 763, citizen climate lobby or that discusses a carbon tax similar to or relevant to our proposals. With “Relevant” I mean things like blogs, environmental web sites and LTEs discussing those same things or any new page featuring climate change and related topics. With “Irrelevant” I mean things that are totally unrelated such as an Indonesian die casting company named “IPCC”. For the articles of general interest, it is really the “very relevant” category that we want, so from this list I kept the search terms “citizens climate lobby” and "HR 763". "climate change" is a very good search term when looking for LTE opportunities in local newspapers, but it is not a good search term for articles of general interest, since hundreds of articles are created every day about climate change.

I tried other search terms as well and the conclusion is that for finding articles of general interest you should use pretty specific search terms for them to be effective. With effective I mean that they will frequently generate alerts while not generate a lot of non-relevant alerts. Some useful ones in order from the most effective to least effective are shown below

Good Search Strings for Articles of General Interest

"carbon price", "tax on carbon", "carbon dividend", "carbon fee and dividend", "H.R. 763", "HR 763", "carbon tax" and as mentioned above "citizens climate lobby".

Some search terms that generated too few alerts were "revenue neutral carbon tax", "make polluters pay", EICDA. Some search terms that generated too many irrelevant or not very relevant alerts were "climate change", "James Hansen", IPCC, and of course, search terms like pollution, environment, and energy did not work at all.

Targeting high profile newspapers and magazines

An alternative that is sort of a middle ground between searching all of the thousands of news sites out there and targeting one or two local newspapers for the purpose of writing LTEs, is targeting a limited set of high profile newspapers. The Google alert search string given below worked pretty well. I picked the 10 largest newspapers in the US, plus Scientific American, Forbes, and the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star Telegram. Since you have a limited set of newspapers you can use search terms such as “climate change” because you won’t get too many results with just 14 newspapers.

site:nytimes.com OR site:wsj.com OR site:nypost.com OR site:washingtonpost.com OR site:startribune.com OR site:newsday.com OR site:bostonglobe.com OR site:forbes.com OR site:dallasnews.com OR site:star-telegram.com OR site:latimes.com OR site:scientificamerican.com "climate change" OR "carbon tax" OR "carbon fee" OR "citizens climate" OR "HR 763"

or using the pipe operator instead of “OR”