There was an alternative called Mention[1] that made the front page[2] of HN a few days ago, I have no idea how it compares in terms of features/quality/etc though:

[1]https://en.mention.net/

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5376180

The pricing of Mention alone torpedoes it as a tool for anyone but a commercial entity: you need to pay them $120 a year to get like more than 5 searches! (5 searches wouldn't even cover my existing Google Alerts for just my family, to say nothing of all the other interesting things I want news of.)

and they same to have a native client for win/lin/mac ... which is nice... but wouldnt a web portal be the way to do this

Hi, I'm a co-founder at mention. mention goes way beyond what Google Alerts can do. We're real-time, monitor way more sources (Twitter for example).

We do have native clients, but we also have a web and mobile version available. We'll soon be available right from your iPad too.

ah cool. I'd put it on my list of platforms then, Windows, Mac, Linux, Web :)

You could roll your own, I suppose. Start building an index and feed it search results on a regular basis. I shouldn't be too much of a problem to hack something together with SQLite3, CRON, and your favorite scripting language.

Sounds like a fun project, actually. Thanks, I'll add it to the queue with side projects!

Newsle.com is one for people-related alerts. Grabs your LinkedIn and just gives you news on people in your network.