With a little nudge from Rasheen, I found answers to my 3 complaints:

1. Exclude domains from your alerts. Sure enough, if you add -site:domain.com to your alerts, you will no longer recieve alerts from that specific domain.  Example: If I want to watch for any links to my blog, but exclude mybloglog and FriendFeed from the alerts, the alert would look something like this: link:http://blog.justinkorn.com/ -site:mybloglog.com -site:friendfeed.com
2. Include only certain domains in alerts. You probably guessed it, do the same thing as above, but remove the dash before “site:”  Example: If I wanted to watch for an mentions of my name on FriendFeed only, I’d simple create an alert like this: “Justin Korn” site:friendfeed.com
3. Exclude alerts with other given terms or phrases. Like the two examples above, all you have to do is add the phrase you want excluded to your alert.  Example: If I wanted only alerts of “Korn on the Blog” that do NOT have the term “photography” accompanying it, it would look like this: “Korn on the Blog” -photography
4. Alerts with other given terms or phrases. And, of coarse, vice versa, if you wanted to get alerts where only a certain word or phrase is mentioned, you could do the same thing.   Example: Lets say I wanted to be alerted whenever there is a mention of “Korn on the Blog” anywhere on the web, but only if the term “photography” accompanies it, all I would need is: “Korn on the Blog” +photography

So there you have it…if you can do it with a Google search, you can do it with a Google alert.

Special thanks to Rasheen for getting me on the right track with this.  Google Alerts are 10x more useful now.

Till next time…

1. Exclude domains from your alerts.  mybloglog.com is one of the domains I’d really like to remove from my alerts.  My own domain (justinkorn.com) is another.  With the little amount my name and domain are actually being mentioned out in internet land, I’m getting way too many emails.  For someone that follows a big brand name, I’m sure there are certain domains they could exclude from their alerts as well.
2. In extension to the above, only include certain domains for alerts.  Perhaps I only want to be notified as-it-happens for instances on cnn.com, but daily or weekly for instances elsewhere.
3. Exclude alerts with other given terms or phrases.  This isn’t one that I would use personally (yet), but I don’t see why it is not an option.  If my name is mentioned in a post or article with, say the phrase “Wisconsin” perhaps I don’t want that alert because there is another person in Wisconsin with the same name.

These are just three very simple options that could, and should, be implemented into Google alerts.  What other options would you like to see Google Alerts implement?  Is there another service out there that provides more robust options?

Till next time…

[UPDATE]: Thanks to Rahsheen, I dug a little deeper.