Is there a Google Alerts type service for internet discussion forums?

September 30, 2022 9:07 AM

Is there a Google Alerts type service for internet discussion forums or Twitter?

Let's say I'm researching a topic like "the Gig Economy". And I want to find real stories from real people.

Yes, I can input the term into Google Alerts and get all sorts of media (often newswire) stories about the Gig Economy. However, most of these are not primary sources that you find from people reporting their actual experiences of the Gig Economy. And TBH, Google Alerts does not to be very good for this sort of research.

Aside from the excellent Ask Metafilter (of course...), some of the best primary resources would appear to be on internet discussion forums, Reddit or Twitter. But does anyone know of any tools for these sites where keywords can trigger an alert?

posted by jacobean to Technology (2 answers total)

Best answer: Newsblur (another RSS reader) can do the same thing with Twitter search results, if Inoreader is not your cup of tea. It will also handle complex searches, if there are terms/users you wish to exclude. I find it easiest to perfect the search on Twitter, and then simply copy the resulting URL over to add as a feed on Newsblur. This is not strictly an RSS feed though - it is an additional capability of Newsblur (and Inoreader).

You can create an RSS feed for a Twitter search through Nitter (an alternative Twitter front-end). To obtain the link for an RSS feed on Nitter, plug in your desired search, and the RSS icon will appear in the upper right-hand corner of the results page.

You can also create RSS feeds from Reddit search results, using the following format (just an example): 'https://www.reddit.com/search.xml?q=donald+trump&sort=new&t=all'.

If you don't want to use RSS, then I understand that you can use IFTT to generate email notifications from RSS feeds, but I have no experience with that. That approach wouldn't work for Twitter searches though, but you could use it with the Nitter RSS feed.
posted by Tawita at 6:04 PM on September 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you MollyRealized and Tawita.

I'm going to check these out!
posted by jacobean at 3:57 PM on October 5, 2022