Every day, Google sends me emails showing recent news stories that contained the words “ice sculpture,” “ice carving,” “ice bar,” or “ice hotel.” So when something interesting in the world of ice carving makes news, I usually hear about it right away. In one case, because of the emails, I was able to let a friend know that organizers of an event for which he was about to provide services were having trouble getting the proper approval for the event. So he knew that he had to be careful and get any money up front before he invested more time and effort.

    If you would like to get similar emails, go to www.google.com, click “Google News” and after you get to the next page, click “Google Alerts.” Then you can set it to send you an email if any news articles show up that have your keywords in them. Sometimes, you may even find an article that has your own name in it!

    Google also recently added a News Archive search function and a Google Blogs search environment (this site doesn’t show up right away yet and I don’t know why; If I can, I’ll find out.)