Search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) provide an alert service linked to their news service (Google News, Yahoo! News, etc.). It is also possible to set an alert on a topic of your choice.

An example with Google:

Google provides a free alert service, Google Alerts, that can regularly send the results of a prespecified query to an email address.

You do not need to create a personal account to create an alert. However, you will need an account to manage your alerts.

Specify:

1. The topic(s) of interest for the search: use a basic search query, place a phrase between inverted commas, etc.
2. The corpus or corpora of interest: web, news, forums, everything, etc. To widen the scope of the alert, choose "Everything".
3. The alert frequency: daily, weekly, etc. depending on the topic.
4. The e-mail address.
5. Confirm to create the alert.

• Go to the engine’s Advanced search feature
• Fill in the most relevant fields (title, author, field, etc.).
• Confirm.
• Copy the query generated by Google. For example, "formation documentaire" site:http://www.univ-brest.fr (the inverted commas are used to indicate that you are searching for a character string, "site" is to specify that you only wish to run the search within the specified website: http://www.univ-brest.fr).
• Copy it to the Google Alerts form and specify the parameters (type, frequency, email, etc.).