The Core

As they were pulling the plug on Reader I was saying to myself, "at least I still have Alerts..." Silly me...

http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/21/google-alerts-broken-useless-and-slowed-to-a-trickle/
http://searchengineland.com/google-alerts-still-broken-152444

My first quest has been to look for alternatives. I'd be interested to know what you guys use as my online searches have not come up with much that looks usable or affordable.

It's been crap for a while, but good still miss it massively. It seems that alternatives are thin on the ground too .

Ahrefs put out an announcement this week about a new "mentions" tracker. That might take up some of the slack.

Trackur is Andy Beal's ORM tool (Online Reputation Management).

It's pretty good, not sure that it would be a replacement for Google Reader, although to be fair I've never liked reader so pleased to see it go, they never did a jot of development work with it.

The plus side to this is that the 2005 RSS technology might lead someone (Digg possibly) to come from the pack and make a much better RSS reader that we can all adopt.

I use Reeder for the Mac/iPad etc. and they say they are working on a solution, they have some time still.

Trackur is good, I give it a big thumbs up.

Head - Slap

So, I'm guessing that we'll all just be scraping google results for this then? 

no, I'll be beta testing your new scraping tool

Well, that is what I am thinking. However I've got 3 tools in production - I really need to get one finished before starting another.

- http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2013/03/mention-a-possible-replacement-for-google-alerts.html
 
- http://www.jeremyfloyd.com/2013/03/google-alerts-alternatives/