Overwhelmed by Google Alerts, or other free online current awareness services? Take a look at Silobreaker (www.silobreaker.com), a service that pulls information from blogs, news, media, fact sheets, reports and other sources, categorizes and visualizes the results to help you better understand your query. Silobreaker allows searching by keywords, and also allows you to narrow down to a specific company query as well. Search results include a map visualizing related terms to your query (image below was a search on Monsanto), plus a sidebar with people, companies, key phrases, organizations, industries, cities and countries related to the query. Quotes and related documents occupy a prominent place on the search results page, allowing you to quickly jump to additional articles. 

Silobreaker also allows you to perform "network search" (identify relationships), "hot spots search" (auto mapping of news results) , "trends search" (chart media attention to a topic) as well as allowing advanced filtering to improve the results of a search.

Overall, I like Silobreaker, It can certainly help anyone needing to monitor companies or industries, and the price is right (free). I'm also interested in some of their upcoming features, including news alerts ... it will be interesting to compare them against Google Alerts for relevancy.