One of the things I’ve done to research future expat destinations is setting up Google Alerts.
What is a Google Alert? As you can see in the image, a Google Alert is
“a content change detection and notification service, offered by the search engine company Google. The service sends emails to the user when it finds new results – such as web pages, newspaper articles, or blogs – that match the user’s search term.”
Lifehacker says this about Google Alerts:
Google Alerts is one of Google’s hidden gems. It’s a really powerful tool to keep track of trends, interesting topics, or anything really new that appears on the web.
A Google Alert is easy to set up, and it’s a good way to monitor the web for desired topics being written about.
Once you set up a Google Alert you will get a daily email with links to articles on that particular alert for the day. For us, that’s various travel destinations.
For example, after Playa del Carmen (one of our chosen places to live) had violence in a nightclub last month :( I was able to easily follow the news on it with Google Alerts. As a result, I’ll follow the alerts for the next year to see how Playa fares but we’re also going to check other locations now.
Even though we aren’t leaving the United States for a while, Google Alerts gives me a better feeling of the places we’re interested in living.
Worldschool here we come!
Digital Nomadism here we come!
Adventure here we come!