Google alerts

Let’s face it, almost everyone who is on the Internet uses Google. Yes, they track your searches and yes that leads to targeted advertising, but the bottomline is most people don’t seem to care, because Google works so well.

Most of the time.

Other times, it has, shall we say, interesting results.

A few years ago now I set up a bunch of “Google alerts” which are news feeds that send you links to anything that’s been written on that subject recently.

For example, I set up a Google alert for Glacier National Park. It not only finds most of the locally written stories about Glacier, it also finds the nationally written stories about Glacier, provided enough people have read them. That’s the problem with Google. It’s great at finding what’s popular, but not necessarily what’s relevant, or, in some cases, accurate.

But I digress.

If you set up a Google alert for Glacier, you’ll often get stories about Joe Blow from Indiana who works for a newspaper and wrote about their trip to the Park. Sometimes the stories are entertaining. Most of the time, they are the usual, “I saw a mountain and I drove the Sun Road and it was spectacular.”

Things get more interesting with a Google alert for Flathead. You get a lot of local stories about the Flathead Valley. You also get a lot of catfish reports. Lurking in the waters of the Midwest are big Flathead catfish, and Lou and Harry catch a lot of them, if you get my drift.

Not exactly relevant to the local scene, but if I’m ever in the Midwest, I know where to drop a line to catch a fish big enough to swallow my arm.

It gets even more interesting if you set up a Google alert for Blackfeet, which I did. Innocently, I wanted to keep track of headlines about the Blackfeet Tribe, which usually show up in the Cut Bank Pioneer Press or the Glacier Reporter — fine newspapers that I don’t have time to read every week.

Google to the rescue, sort of. Yep, it finds many Blackfeet headlines.

But black feet are also the subject of the Internet underworld as well. Here’s one, straight from Craigslist that Google was kind enough to find for me.

“Black feet needed. Black feet wanted. Black feet must be rubbed in my face. Please, help a lonely guy out.”

OK, Google. That’ll do, thank you very much.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.