Yahoo turns off Search Alerts frontend, leaves users without management options

Yahoo! Search Alerts is was a Google Alerts alternative for Yahoo users. The service provided you with tools to monitor search keywords in Yahoo's engine and receive notifications when new websites or pages were added to Yahoo Search.

Unlike Google Alerts, Yahoo! Search Alerts supported only email notifications and not RSS notification options.

Emails were sent out by the company based on the frequency setting on the alerts management panel.

There you had options to set alerts to be sent daily or in near real-time.

If you try to open the Yahoo! Search Alerts website right now you will notice that it won't open anymore at all.

You are redirected to the main Yahoo website instead or a local version of it depending from where in the world you are connecting to the Internet.

While that may not be a big issue for new users who wanted to use the service to monitor Yahoo Search keywords, it is highly problematic for existing Search Alerts users.

The main issue here is that alerts are still being sent out by Yahoo based on the last Search Alerts configuration.

There is however no option anymore to manage these alerts. If you want to disable the monitoring of a search keyword you cannot do so because there is no management page that lets you do that. There is no option anymore to modify keywords, change frequencies or delete keywords outright.

Each alert email that you receive contains a link to modify the alert. But the pages these links lead to are not available anymore as well.

This means that Yahoo Search Alerts users are stuck with alerts that they cannot delete nor modify anymore.

It is probably only a matter of time before Yahoo turns off the backend as well but for now, that has not been the case.

While you could set up email filters to block alerts, it needs to be done individually if you want to receive some alerts but not others.

Users who want to modify alerts cannot do so right now. I contacted Yahoo for a statement but have not heard back from the company yet.

You could try contacting Yahoo directly as well if you want Search Alerts turned off for your account or modified in any way.

Now You: Are you using a Search Alerts service?