Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a content change detection and notification service, offered by the search engine company Google. The service sends emails to the user when it finds new results—such as web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, or scientific research—that match the user's search term(s).[1][2] In 2003, Google launched Google Alerts which were the result of Naga Kataru's efforts. His name is on the three patents for Google Alerts.[3]

Google reported the system was not functioning properly as of 2013: "we're having some issues with Alerts not being as comprehensive as we'd like".[4] However, the service is still operational and completely accessible around the world.[5] Google Alerts continued to face critical performance issues and temporary regional unavailability but the Google technical support has been successfully addressing the reported issues by users on its official forum.[6]

Indexing is a term known in the SEO community when Google sends out its bots to crawl a site and the page is added into their database and will come up when a user types in a certain set of keywords. DigitalGov puts it this way, "If the website is optimized correctly, Google and other search engines will spider and index the pages and their respective keywords, allowing the government website to show up high on search engines when a user is searching for related information."