If you have alerts set up in any legal or general news service, you probably know what it is like to receive more results than you can reasonably process. Maybe your legal research and other search terms are overly broad or pull up the same words in an unrelated context. Or perhaps your otherwise perfectly reasonable alert is suddenly THE hottest topic in legal news, say, infectious disease control or business interruption and insurance or force majeure clause and epidemic. If you ignore your daily or as-it-happens alert updates, you run the risk of missing important and relevant news. If you read through all the results, you will get nothing else done all day. Here are a few ways to narrow your topic to end up with useful, targeted updates. And you can always ask your law librarian for expert guidance.

• Take advantage of vendor-provided advanced search techniques  Every system uses different algorithms and advanced search techniques so start there. Read the documentation, sign up for training, or search online for tips.
• Use provided filters or limiters  When you run your initial search, apply applicable limiters, like those described below. It will save you scrolling through irrelevant results. For example, you can typically search across headlines or abstracts or named people and companies only instead of the full body of an article.
• Refine terms  In nearly all systems, you can add quotation marks for phrase searching like “nursing home” and often, it is effective to add a + in front of a word to force its inclusion in results, like +inspection. Add alternative words or phrasing. You might be able to disregard stories with particular words, like -hospital (Google) or AND NOT hospital (Lexis.)
• Use nesting or Boolean operators  Most systems use sophisticated algorithms to execute your search but you can force your intended search and the sequence of operations by using operators like AND, OR, and NOT and parentheses.  
• Limit to geographic regions  Typically a filter used to refine searches, geographic limiters or restrictions by place of publication can rule out unwanted results. You can also include a place name, like a local municipality or a state, in the search itself.
• Restrict to trusted, major publications  When searching general and legal news, you’ll quickly notice duplicate news stories and coverage from less-than-trustworthy sources. You might limit by certain credible or desired sources or types of sites (site:ap.com or site:.gov on Google, for example) and you can often choose a search filter than eliminates largely duplicative articles.
• Add proximity limiters  Make use of available proximity limiters to force searches for words close together but not a phrase like words in the same sentence (/s) or same paragraph (/p) or words within a certain number of words from each other (/n).
• Restrict results to in-plan  If you’re using a paid service and want to avoid paying for any out-of-plan content and even seeing it, use available filters to limit your search and alert results to in-plan articles.
• Search within results  Run a search first to review your results. Then adjust your search and add filters before saving it as an alert. You can also revise your alerts later when you identify additional ways to restrict hits.