I use these extensively but I'm curious how many others also do.

I mostly set mine up so that search result type is 'news' rather than 'everything' and for 'how many' keep the default of 'only the best.'

That tends to narrow down the number of alerts you get on a given topic to just one or two per day for pretty specific searches. But even for something fairly broad, it keeps it to a very manageable number.

If you sign in with a gmail address, you can even keep track of and manage your alerts.