Remember the Legion of Doom? For you non-80’s kids, this was a league of mostly sub-par villains (for example the Riddler, super power: Puzzle creation, problem solving). They spent most of their time sitting around the Hall of Doom, thinking up ways to defeat the Justice League.

We imagine there was a similar scene at google, the day they thought up their unofficial slogan, “don’t be evil.”

Lex Luthor (evil genius): We need to create a PR campaign to hide the fact that we’re making a move to take over the world.

Toyman (super power – Creates destructive toys): I know! How about we make it our company motto to not be evil!?

Brainiac (evil genius android): Hmmm. Seems a little obvious, don’t you think?

Lex Luthor: You’re an idiot Toyman! You’re fired!

three hours and much discussion later…

Lex Luthor: How about we make our unofficial company motto, “Don’t be evil.”

Brainiac: brilliant, sir. The public will play right into our hands.

Solomon Grundy (super strong zombie): Grundy love evil!

Lex Luthor (aside to Brainiac): Don’t let Grundy talk to the press.

And thus, google began its play to take over the world. Since then, they’ve grown to massive size and been valued at $23 billion+.

The good news is they’ve released a whole bunch of free crap to help us freelancers.

Case in point? Google Alerts.

With Google Alerts, you can ask google to send you an e-mail every day of everything posted on the internet on said day that contains a certain key word. For example – let’s say I want to know everything possible about Lex Luthor. I go to google alerts, set up an alert for Lex Luthor, and bam – I get notified any time anyone on the interwebs talks about him.

Things to use Google Alerts for:

1. Track your clients
2. Track topics you want to learn about
3. Track your competition
4. Get ideas for your blog
5. See who’s talking about you on the internet

We’ll be discussing more free ways to feed into the google superpower in upcoming posts, so stay tuned.