Here’s a Goody that is a refinement on a Must Have Google tool- Google News Alerts. I’ve said it before: if your job or your life involves gathering information as it happens, there is no finer tool than Google News Alerts.

And, it’s just gotten better. Up to this point, when you create a news alert, that’s what you got- a news alert. It included what to keep an eye out for, how often to let you know when it foinds something, and where to send the news. Then you had to wait for an email to that address, where you got to confirm the creation of the alert.

Now, when you want to create an alert, you can still do it the old-fashioned way OR you can log onto a Google Account. You sign up for free (of course) and it enables this marvelous improvement in alerts- the Manage Alerts page. Here you can create, delete, or edit alerts and they automatically become active. You also see a table showing ALL your current alerts. Plus, when you create an alert, you get a choice of having Google keep watch on news sources only, the web only, or both.

As usual, when something good comes along for the first time, it often has the name Google in front of it.