How to Get Alerts for New Articles That Match Your Keywords

Subscribing to a feed is an all-or-nothing promise. You either take everything a site publishes, or you take nothing, and the site decides what that is. For a source that posts ten times a day and is worth reading twice a month, that is a bad arrangement.

Keyword alerts are the way out of it. Give RSS Wrangler a handful of words and it raises a browser notification when a new article matches, so you keep the subscription without keeping the flood. This article covers how to turn alerts on, how to write keywords that are specific enough to be worth having, and the two settings alerts depend on to actually reach you.

What an alert does, precisely

Worth being exact about, because the boundary explains most disappointments. An alert is checked against two fields of each newly discovered article: its title and its description. That is the whole search surface. The body of the article is never read, so a piece that mentions your subject in its fourth paragraph will not fire an alert even though you would have liked it.

Alerts also only fire for articles that a refresh has actually discovered. Nothing here polls on its own schedule in the background of a closed browser.

Alerts match on title and description, so the words you care about need to be in the summary a publisher writes.

Turning alerts on

Open Settings from the top menu bar and find Keyword Alerts. Enable it, then add the words you want to watch for. That is the whole setup. Chrome handles the notification itself, so there is no separate permission to grant beyond the browser's own prompt the first time.

Because an alert is raised by a refresh, two things have to be true for it to arrive:

• Background refresh must be enabled, under Background Features in the same settings panel.
• The feed must not be skipped by background refresh. Each feed in your list has a Background Refresh toggle. A feed toggled off is excluded from scheduled refreshes, so it will not raise alerts on the schedule.

If alerts work for one feed and never for another, that toggle is the first thing to check. Refresh the feed by hand and the alert for its next article will appear immediately, which is a quick way to confirm the keywords are right and the schedule is the problem.

Writing keywords that do not fire constantly

This is where most people get it wrong, and the failure looks like the feature being broken. A keyword alert set to news or update will fire on a large share of articles from any given site, because those are the words publishers use in summaries by default. You end up with notifications you dismiss without reading, which trains you to ignore the whole system.

The test for a keyword is simple: would you want to read an article about this from every source you subscribe to? If the answer is no, it is too broad. Words that pass that test fall into a few groups:

• Product and project names. A specific tool, a library or a codename. These are the highest-value keywords, because only articles genuinely about it carry the name.
• People. A surname is usually specific enough on its own, since a summary that names someone is usually about them.
• Companies and organisations. Effective when the company name is distinctive. Generic ones like Google or Microsoft will match too much to be useful.
• Phrases rather than single words. If a two-word phrase identifies the subject better than either word alone, use the phrase.

Start with three or four and only add more when a specific thing you wanted slipped past. An alert set you check is worth more than a larger set you mute.

Choosing a refresh interval

The interval is set in Background Features alongside the badge toggle, and the choices are 15, 30, 60 and 240 minutes, with 30 as the default. It sets the worst-case delay between an article being published and an alert reaching you.

Choosing shorter is not free. Each refresh asks every subscribed feed for new content, and the publisher's server pays for that. A 15-minute interval across a large list is a noticeable amount of traffic to hand to sites that never asked for it, so 30 or 60 is a better default for most people. Short intervals suit a small list of sources where the immediacy genuinely matters.

Background refresh also runs once when the browser starts and once after installation, so a first look at your feeds happens without waiting for the interval to elapse.

What alerts do not cover

Two limits are worth stating plainly, because both look like faults if you assume otherwise.

The browser must be running. Refresh happens on startup and on the interval while the browser is open. A closed browser raises nothing, so an alert for an article published at night will arrive when you next open Chrome, not at midnight.

Keywords are local settings, not subscriptions. They live in your browser alongside your other preferences and are not part of your subscription data, so exporting your feed list does not include them. A backup restores your sources, not your alert vocabulary. If you have built a keyword list you care about, keep it somewhere separate. The Privacy Policy covers what is stored and confirms none of it leaves the browser.

If a source publishes a bare headline and an empty description, alerts on it will rarely fire no matter how good your keywords are, because there is nothing to match against.

FAQ

Summary

Keyword alerts let you keep a subscription without taking the flood. Enable them in Settings, then write keywords specific enough that you would want the article from any source: product names, surnames and distinctive organisations work, generic news words do not. Alerts match on titles and descriptions only, and they fire on refresh, so background refresh has to be running and the feed must not be toggled off. With 30 minutes as the default interval you will hear about a relevant article within half an hour of it appearing, while the browser is open.

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