I've been fascinated by Google Alerts for a long time but it never seems to deliver alerts as expected. As a final test I created a second Google account (in case there was something wrong with my primary account) and then generated a unique term that is not indexed in Google yet. This is the search term: 123MrwNcvxALUkLV3uFPtouczLsfvYcnnr (it's a new Bitcoin address).
I searched the term as alerts on both my existing account as well as the new one with options (all results, as it happens, all regions, etc.). I then made sure that Google indexed the search term (I just made a bitcoin payment to that address causing it to be used and displayed on various web sites and thus indexed by Google).
Sure enough a week later and I have zero alerts hits on both accounts even though there are now 18 results when doing a Google search on the term. Even if I go into Alerts web page and edit that search term it shows "There were no results for the query".
Am I misunderstanding what Alerts is supposed to deliver or why can I not get it to work?
There are many other search terms that do show up daily on Google Search but not triggered as an alert.
Best Answer
So the answer is that Google Alerts is a bit useless and probably not useable if you want to track search terms that only show up sporadically. It seems to catch popular phrases which delivers more daily search results (how it decides which page to show as a alert and which not for a specific phrase I do not know).
Mention.com as an alternative works very well but is very expensive. Talkwalker looks like another alternative however not properly tested.
It seems there exist nothing that will catch each and every indexing of an search phrase as you would expect when you search for that same phrase in google.com search engine.
I am resorting to using Google's search api to develop my own app to track my search phrases.