Through its Live Search Blog page, Microsoft announced the introduction of email alerts for Live Search News. Until now, the service did not provide the feature of subscribing for news alerts via email. This is considered by many a very usefull tool and it is likely to catch on extremely quickly among users.

Users will be able to choose to receive the alerts once a day, twice a day or on a weekly basis. The procedure is simple: once logged in on Windows Live, users have to click on ’News alerts’ in order to access the menu and select their preffered email alert option.

The feature is similar to Google’s News Alert, but the difference is that Microsoft introduced an option through which users can choose top headlines or subject-specific news headlines according to their preferences. There is also the possibility to unsubscribe from the news alerts that are no longer useful.

The company’s blog notes that ”Now you can have your news delivered to your inbox every day, twice a day, or just once a week. You can get top headlines, headlines for a specific area like business or world news, or the latest stories related to a search you define. You can set up as many different alerts as you want and send them to any email address associated with a Live ID.”