Google is making a few changes with web alerts this week. The search giant is retiring web alerts and replacing it with an ‘everything’ option.’

Google says that they are retiring web alerts because they weren’t used by enough people. Everything essentially will return the same results as web results. You can also filter your results by news, blogs, video and discussions.

Could this be the beginning of the end of Google Alerts ?

Here’s the message Google sent to Web alerts users:

Dear Google Alerts user,

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.

Hat tip to Wallace N.