One is a google offering and free, the other isn't associated (uses their feed) with google at all but is subscription. How long has the google one been around and is it useful? I've searched the forum but seen no reference to it.
They must be the same company though, why would google allow infringement of their trademark and even font style otherwise? But that's getting away from the original question.
Google Alerts has been around for months (maybe 6) and is quite handy. Lets you see where any new sites might have mentioned one of your sites or just track movement in keywords you are interested in.
I'd never seen Google Alert before and as you say it seems a bit of an infringement.
From what I remember, Google Alert was around for some time before Google created their own offering (from Alexa it seems to have started getting traffic around April 2003).
Its also a bit different from the Google solution as you can get results as RSS feeds.
I've got a feeling GoogleAlert took off quickly and maybe Google didn't react before there was a lot of media coverage saying how great a service it was - at which point its harder for them to pull the plug on it. I am surprised they didn't force a name change on them.
Google Alert has been around for about 2 years and was any early user of the Google Web API. Not only has Google allowed them to keep the name, but they have provided them with an increased capacity Google API Key (which is normally limited to 1000 queries per day).
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