Receive alerts and RSS feeds of search results

What do you want to do?

• Overview

• Receive alerts when search results change

• Subscribe to RSS feeds

Overview

Both alerts and RSS Feeds inform you about updates, and both allow you to customize how much information you receive. They differ in how you receive the updates.

Alerts come in e-mail or as text messages to your mobile phone, at the interval you specify, and let you know when specific items change. For example, if you want to know each time someone adds new files to a library, you can create an alert for yourself or even for a co-worker. You can set up the same type of alert to be notified when search results change.

RSS Feeds help you to consolidate updates from different sites in an RSS reader. RSS Feeds come at periodic intervals, and appear in an RSS reader, where you might already manage subscriptions to other types of information, such as headlines from news or blog sites. There are several types of RSS readers, including stand-alone readers, browsers such as Windows Internet Explorer, and e-mail programs such as Microsoft Outlook.

For more information about setting up alerts on lists, libraries, folders or other items, see Manage alerts.

Receive alerts when search results change

After you perform a search, you can use the Alert Me button to set up future notifications for when the results of that search change. For example, you might search on a team calendar, and then have alerts e-mailed to you whenever the calendar has been changed:

1. Conduct a search and display its results.

2. On the search results page, click Alert Me .

3. On the New Alert page, in the Alert Title box, type a title for the alert. The title will be used as the subject in the e-mail alert.

4. In the Send Alerts To box, type the names of people for whom you want to receive this alert.

   Note:  The Send Alerts To box appears only for people who have Site Owner permissions and above.

5. In the Delivery Methodsection, select the method of delivery you want for your alerts.

   Note:  If the Text Message (SMS) options are grayed out, you might not have a mobile phone number saved on the site. To save a mobile phone number, at the top of the site, click your name, and then click My Settings. Then on the User Information page, click Edit Item. If you have saved a mobile phone number and the options are still grayed out, the site might not be configured for outgoing e-mail and SMS alerts. Contact your server administrator.

6. In the Change Type section, choose the types of changes that you want to track. For example, you can choose to receive alerts only when new items change, when existing items change, or for all changes.

7. In the When to Send Alerts section, choose whether to receive daily or weekly alerts.

8. Click OK. You will receive a confirmation message via e-mail. This message includes a link to your My Alerts on this Site page.

   Note:  Depending on how your site and servers are set up, the person you created an alert for might receive an e-mail message that confirms that you created an alert. The alert e-mail message might provide links to the alert settings, the name of the person who created the alert, a mobile view, and other information and commands.

Subscribe to RSS feeds

Before you can receive RSS feeds, the server administrator must enable RSS Feeds in Central Administration and the site administrator must have enabled RSS feeds for the site on the Site Settings page. To learn more about how to enable RSS feeds for the site or site collection, see the article Manage RSS Feeds.

You can subscribe to RSS feeds of search results. For example, you might search on a specific document that is undergoing revisions. From your search results page, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of that document. You could set your RSS reader to request fresh feeds daily, so that you can review any changes.

To subscribe to RSS feeds for search results, use the following steps.

1. Conduct a search and display the search results.

2. On the search results page, click the RSS button.
   

   Note:  If the RSS button does not appear, RSS has not been enabled for this site.

3. Click Subscribe to this feed.

4. In the Subscribe to this Feed dialog box, in the Name box, type a title for the RSS feed that helps you remember what the search results are for.

5. In the Create in folder list, select Feeds.

6. Click Subscribe. A link to the new RSS feed appears in the Feeds list in your Web browser.

7. Follow any additional instructions in your RSS reader, browser, or e-mail program

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