Google spitting out old data as new alerts

[loopyal]

Am I just unlucky or are others seeing this too?

I have several google alerts.

For the past 6 months, google keeps sending crap along with good stuff.

• its a bit like their search results.

There are three types of Alerts they send that I'm not impressed with.

1. Alerts that are from unintelligible splogs that take real news stories and rewrite them with unintelligible garbage that makes no sense at all. Sometimes, they serve up new alerts from the same splogs I saw several months ago, that I felt sure they would have zapped by now.

2. Old stories, that have been around for months. I just received one that was from January, from TechDirt, a big site that must get a huge amount of attention from google.

3. Irrelevant stories because they love to show how smart they are by splitting my alert keyword text into multiple words, but it gives useless results.

This is the kind of stuff that crappy search engines like AltaVista used to do. Is google reverting to the childhood of search with all these changes?