Can you use Google Alerts for obituaries?

What Google Alerts is

Google Alerts is a free tool from Google. You type in a search, and Google emails you when it finds new pages on the web that match it. You need a Google account to receive alerts by email.

People use it to follow news about a company, a topic or their own name. Because obituaries are published online, it is natural to wonder whether it can also tell you when someone has died. The short answer is that it can help, but it was not built for this job, and it has real gaps.

How to set one up

Setting up an alert takes a couple of minutes:

• Go to google.com/alerts and sign in.
• Type the full name in quotation marks, then the word obituary, for example "Robert Delaney" obituary.
• Click Show options.
• Set How often to As it happens or At most once a day.
• Set How many to All results rather than only the best results.
• Set the region to the United States.
• Click Create Alert.

It is a good idea to make a few alerts for the same person. Try one with a middle initial, one with a nickname, and one with the name plus the city or town, such as "Bob Delaney" Toledo. This catches notices that use a different version of the name.

Where it falls short

Google Alerts works from what Google has found and indexed. That creates a few problems for obituaries in particular.

• Many small funeral home websites are not crawled often, so new notices may be picked up days later or not at all.
• Some obituaries sit inside page layouts or tribute systems that search engines do not read well.
• Newspaper notices behind a paywall may not appear.
• Google decides which results are worth sending, and it does not share how it makes that choice.

The result is that an alert can stay silent even though an obituary is already online. Timing matters here, since many funerals happen within a week or so. If you want to see how quickly services are usually held, read how soon after a death the funeral is.

Too much noise for common names

The opposite problem also happens. If the person has a common name, your inbox can fill with notices for other people who share it, plus news stories, sports results and business pages.

Adding a city helps, but it can also filter out the real notice if the obituary mentions a different town, such as the place the person retired to. There is no easy balance, and you end up reading every alert carefully to decide if it is the right person. Our guide on finding an obituary for a common name has tips for telling people apart.

Making Google Alerts work better

If you decide to use it, a few habits make it more useful:

• Use quotation marks around the name so Google looks for the exact phrase.
• Create separate alerts for maiden names and nicknames.
• Check the alerts page every few months to make sure they are still active.
• Look at your spam folder now and then, since alert emails sometimes land there.
• Do a manual search from time to time as a backup.

It is free, so there is little harm in trying it, as long as you do not rely on it as your only check.

What to use instead

For something that matters, such as a parent you are estranged from, an old friend or a client, you may want a tool made for obituaries. The Passings checks funeral home websites, newspapers and memorial sites every day, compares each new notice against the details you gave, and emails you when there is a likely match. You can read how that works in how it works.

Many people use both. Google Alerts costs nothing and may catch mentions outside obituaries, while a monitoring service focuses only on death notices. Free access for up to 10 names is explained on the pricing page.