Stop searching; Google Alerts will serve you just what you want

The next time you want to search the internet to know how much money Narayana Murthy has once again made or what is the latest 'drop down' menu of Mallika Sherawat, look no further. Instead of searching hordes of search engine results, try Google Alerts.

The company is beta testing this new offering which will make seeking information on the net that much easier.

Just register at Google Alerts, and it gives your a range of subjects that you wish to monitor constantly and with the kind of frequency you desire. Google Alerts will make sure that you will get an alert on the subject wherever it happens across the globe and send it directly into your email box.

Google, with this latest offering, is trying to deliver what the internet has always stood for: help you get the information you want and not consume information which others feel is important for you.

With this service Google is trying to stay just that one step ahead of rivals. Microsoft recently debuted its search engine in a beta format after investing close to $100 million to develop it.

Google Alerts is powered by the Google News portal which scans a humongous 4,500 newspoints across the globe from dawn in east Australia and virtually follows the sun across the globe to daybreak on the US west coast.

Currently Google News scans almost all English newspapers across the world and the company is running a campaign to rope in translators to translate the numerous regional and vernacular newspoints to boost Google News' backend.

Microsoft's recent foray into the search segment is also backed by its powerful crawlers which scan developments every 20 minutes and posts them in its search results and also in its news links.

Just days after Microsoft made its beta search engine public, claiming to scan a staggering 5 billion web documents, ahead of its nearest competitor (read Google) by 0.5 billion, Google has announced that it is scanning more than 8 billion documents and still counting.

For information seekers, this seems to be the best of times.