Change Notification

Email Alerts

I was skeptical of the practical value of email alerts at first, but as I have done more and more research for this project, I have realized they can be incredibly useful in keeping up with websites. One of the deep web search engines I used, Biznar, allows you to receive automatic email updates on your topic of choice, which was "Medical Device" for me. . I chose to have a weekly update delivered to me with all relevant updates on sources from my topic. However, although these email represent updates to the search results, they are not always recent. The articles listed in these weekly emails are often 2 or 3 years old, which can be relevant if they have just recently been indexed, but isn't great if I'm looking for current news.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts were great to monitor updates in news stories. With a Google account, you can easily customize a Google Alert. I chose to updates on the News page with results pertaining to "medical devices" emailed to me once a week - and this way I could preview what results were occurring without having to recurringly check Google and I can also glimpse through results and see which ones are relevant.

Page Monitors

Most of the pages I used as resources for this wiki had RSS feeds, however I found a few interesting individual web pages that were updated rather infrequently or did not have RSS Feeds. I used Watchthatpage as a page monitoring services. What I really liked about this site was the ability to track changes - you can immediately tell if the change is information based or merely formatting with the site.

Overall

Due to the nature of most of the resources I was employing, RSS Feeds were the most useful for allowing me to keep up with constantly updating resources. However, I also discovered that email updates and page monitors can be useful if there is a specific need for them - either a particular page isn't updated too often or you are interested in tracking exact changes. They were not my most frequently used tools, but I learned their value for future use.

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