50000 things people track on the web

Do you know what people like to get alerted about? If you guessed Earthquakes in Bay Area and Allergies on the East Coast, you're in for a surprise.
And, where do most people care to track the web? Silicon Valley? Nope. It's Auburn! OK, one should not derive drastic conclusions from a mere 50K random data points, but let's drop our statistician hats a bit and have some data fun, shall we?

I'm sharing some insights from a sample of 50000 alerts people have set up on Alertpedia.com. Alertpedia has been providing free email alerts since 2005 on stuff ranging from Craigslist & Amazon to Jobs & Houses to Earthquakes & Local Concerts. The idea is simple: you specify what you want to be alerted about (e.g., "email me when a Bike goes on sale in Madison, WI on Craigslist; or a when big quake happens in California") and forget about it. Alertpedia tracks 1000s of websites on your behalf and only emails you when that stuff happens.

So here are some quick graphics on the kind of stuff people like to track on the web.

What Categories do people set up alerts on?

The winner is - Local-Forsale, which is essentially stuff posted on Craigslist for sale. The world loves to track Craigslist! Some of the categories like Amazon alerts are very new, so I expect them to pick up steam over time.

What key words do people track the most across the categories?

 Gimme Free! Website jobs anyone? Honda and Toyoto still rule the roads! And Obama beats Sharepoint!

And where? 

Surprise, Auburn, Alabama rules! Looking at the time series of alerts from there, I realized a nice viral effect - one person sets up a few alerts, then a few join the next day, and so on. Are people more social in Auburn?

So what does a data scientist want?

There's no end to what a data miner can dig out of this data.. Drill down the data on time, location, category, filter, etc.. and correlate it with what's happening in the world at that time (Quake in Japan, and the number of Quake alerts go up). This is great stuff! Of course Google Search and Alerts have a billion times more data, but not this sort of categorized and semantically rich alerts!

Gotta love data! Thank you Alertpedia and all the users for using it.

Want to experience the future web? Set up some custom alerts on Alertpedia:, let it track the web for you, so you can have more time for the "real world"! :)

thanks, vishy

Vishy Poosala

innovate & impact