Google Search now helps you set up email notifications for when you’re mentioned on the web

Google is making it a little easier for you to get an alert whenever your name gets mentioned on the internet.

Now, when you Google yourself, so long as you’re logged into Google and you’ve allowed it to save your web and app activity, Google will show you a new widget at the bottom of the first page of search results that will help you easily set up a Google Alert to track new references to your name.

This is a reasonable move for Google to make. Google Alerts have been around since 2003. These days, if you want to find out what’s online about you, you Google yourself; you don’t set up a Google Alert. But the thing is that even though they’re not the hot new thing, Google Alerts work well. You can adjust settings — like email frequency, source types, languages, regions, whether to only send the best results, and the email address to send alerts to. So Google Alerts provide the back end for this new tool.

When you click on the widget — which uses the heading “Stay in the loop” — Google takes you to a Google Alert form that already has your name in quotation marks. Once you’ve tweaked the settings, just hit “Create Alert,” and you’re done.

In a blog post last month, Google showed the feature in a screenshot, although it had not yet been released, as a Google spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. Now the feature is live.