Excluding a site from Google Alerts query

google-alerts

I've got a google alert setup as follows :

"Example Company" OR "http://www.example.com/" -site:pinterest.com

What I'm trying to achieve here is to get an alert for articles/content that:

The above line used to work as I've had it setup for the past 3 years or so, but recently I've started to get loads of Pinterest results, so it seems the Pinterest filter isn't working.

Any ideas why this is/what needs to be updated in my Alerts search query?

Best Answer

You can use the Google Advanced Search page to put together a list of search criteria in an easy way. Then, by clicking Advanced Search, it will give you the exact criteria. These results can then be pasted into Google Alerts as the search criteria.

You will notice on the page that there is not an option for -site:. If this is a recent change on Google's behalf or not, I'm not sure. However the suggestion posted by @pnuts to use -pinterest should give you the desired results.

EDIT: The following criteria has not returned any results from http://pinterest.com/, however has given results including the text pinterest and http://pinterest.com/:

Pinterest Google Alerts example

With that being the case, it's possible that Google has changed something in the way that Alerts work. Likely, if the Alert is re-created, the problem will be resolved.

Although that is not ideal as it does not find the root cause of the problem, it is a viable workaround in the case that Google Alerts change again.

Related Topic