In April 2010, Google made Google Suggest — which is now is calling “Autocomplete” — locally relevant, so that if you are in a specific city or metropolitan area, Google will tailor the autocompletions based on that area.

Google said they have extended the “hyper-local predictions” around the globe to every country that has Autocomplete. For example, those in Barcelona, Spain who start typing [rest] will be autocompleted to see [restaurants in Barcelona].

Google Alerts for News has been adapted to show you a more generic response of alerts for more generic queries. Google explained:

However, we’ve found many people are specifying general topics like “finance,” “entertainment” or even simply “news.” Up until this week, Google Alerts would return a long list of content from across the web about these very broad topics. This worked, but we realized it’s probably much more helpful to send you the corresponding section from Google News, since it seems like you’re looking for a digest of the big topics of the day. So we’re now including News sections in Alerts if you enter one of the following terms like: news, world news, business, entertainment, finance, health, science, sports or technology. This allows you to have your favorite part of Google News delivered to your inbox every morning.

(1) Google Translate added Latin as a new language. Google said, “although considered a “dead language” by many, Latin is still studied by hundreds of thousands of students worldwide and is the predecessor to many modern tongues.” I am sure those who study in this language welcome it to Google Translate.

(2) Google has updated their flu shot location search in collaboration with the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services (HHS). The flu season is right around the corner and it might pay for you to get your shot early, if possible.

(3) Google Alerts for Video added 40 languages. Google Alerts added video alerts a few years ago, but only in the English language. Now it is available in English and 39 additional languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish.

In regards to the quality change, Googler Marcel said:

Regarding the volume of alerts, we’ve been tweaking Alerts from a quality point of view to try and avoid sending things that people aren’t interested in. If you want more results, change the “Email length” setting for your alerts from “up to 20 results” to “up to 50 results” – you’ll get more results with looser filtering.

In regards to dropping the web filter in exchange for the “everything” drop down, Google said:

We’re contacting you because you have an alert of type Web. We’ve decided to retire Web alerts because (1) they are used by very few people and (2) an alert of type Everything will find the same results.

This week we’ll be changing all alerts of type Web into alerts of type Everything. Your alert will continue to include results from all kinds of web sites.

You may receive more results after this change. If you find that you are getting too many results, you can change the “How often” setting to “once a day” or “once a week.” You can also change your search query. You can do this on the alerts management page (www.google.com/alerts/manage), or by removing the alert using the link at the bottom of each alert email and creating it again with different settings.

We hope that you’ll continue to find your alert useful.

Here is a current picture of the options you can get Google Alerts for, including everything, news, blogs, videos, and discussions. Everything does include web results and I believe it was originally named “comprehensive”:

The last time we saw a significant upgrade to Google Alerts was when Google Alerts added RSS as a subscription option back in 2008.

Perry explained to reporters as she walked down the red carpet to the Grammys this week that she uses Google Alerts to track news about herself:

Unfortunately, I still Google myself sometimes.

I saw it on Google alerts. I’m going to be honest!

That’s from Monsters & Critics, and many other publications including the New York Daily News have the same quote.

Just a couple weeks ago, I reported on a Microsoft investigation of cyberchondria, when inaccurate medical information online makes actual health problems worse. On Friday, Dilbert cartoon creator Scott Adams shared a different point of view, telling blog readers how Google helped him find treatment for a speech defect known as Spasmodic Dysphonia.

More specifically, Adams was using Google Alerts to get information about the condition. Google notified him of an “obscure medical publication” that wrote about Spasmodic Dysphonia. He took the information to his own doctor, was referred from there to other doctors, and eventually had successful surgery to fix the voice defect.

“I never would have found that path without Google Alerts,” Adams writes.

But is his story representative of what typically happens when we use the Internet to search for medical information? The Microsoft paper released last month explained that using the Internet to diagnose health problems can make the problem worse than it really is:

“… the Web has the potential to increase the anxieties of people who have little or no medical training, especially when Web search is employed as a diagnostic procedure. We use the term cyberchondria to refer to the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology, based on the review of search results and literature on the Web.”

About 30% of people in the Microsoft study experience “heightened anxiety” because of what they learn online after doing a web search about medical conditions. But Adams says he’s used the Internet — “Dr. Google” as he calls it — “dozens of times to diagnose various minor medical problems, or to find out what things are dangerous or not.” And he poses some interesting questions about how well the Internet could diagnose non-emergency medical problems, both common and uncommon:

“With the uncommon problems, such as my spasmodic dysphonia, I have to wonder if Google (or WebMD, etc.) can do a better job than a doctor, if not now then maybe in the near future. If you could call up videos of people with identical symptoms, couldn’t you diagnose most of your own problems?

For example, are you any worse than your doctor at looking at High Definition pictures of a skin problem and comparing it to your own skin problem?

My guess is that the Internet could equal your doctor in diagnosing uncommon problems. WebMD for example asks a bunch of diagnostic questions and narrows down your symptoms just as a doctor would. That system will only improve over time.

Adams goes on to wonder about using an online database to handle prescriptions, with pharmacist oversight built-in. Something like that may already be included in government discussions of a national health database; I don’t follow the details enough to know for sure if it is or not.

Ultimately, it’s an interesting discussion. Adams’ concept of “Dr. Google” doesn’t seem too outlandish, but — to borrow a common medical analogy — four out of five doctors would probably disagree.

As expected, Google has added an RSS feed for web search results to the Google Alerts service. As seen in the screenshot above, when creating a new alert, you can now choose to get the alert via email or RSS feed. RSS feed alerts are only available to logged-in Google account holders.

As we reported earlier this month, Google is the last major search engine to offer its web search results via RSS.

This is a good addition, but I have to agree with Google Operating System today: “The new feature from Google Alerts is useful, but Google should’ve provided an option to subscribe to feeds for each search result.”

In an email today, a Google spokesperson told us: “While I can’t be more specific about an ETA, I can confirm the launch.”

Google Alerts offers email-only notifications on results from News, Web, Blogs, Video and Groups.

Google is currently the only major search engine not offering RSS feeds of web search results.