I have been using Yahoo! Alerts to alert me to changes in my custom RSS feeds, crawled from CalTrans, for changes in the status of Interstate 80 over the Sierra. I noticed today that although my RSS feed has picked up the recent changes, Yahoo! Alerts doesn’t seem to be crawling it, and their view of it is 5 days stale at this point. There is no “refresh” button on Yahoo! Alerts, but I can see their list of items matches up with 5 days ago in my feed. I have it set to send me changes “as they happen”, since I need to know the road conditions to drive back and forth to Reno. Anything else is kind of worthless. What’s up with that?
Jeremy Cole 
I’m noticing the same thing. I’m trying to alert on this yahoo pipe http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=3CEpxMc23RGxWhcPmLokhQ&_render=rss&maxAsk=800&minAsk=250 and the pipe is getting new results but the alert is not real time. I got one alert at laround 9:00am, but I’m pretty sure the new items where there a bit before that (like an hour or two) Is it supposed to be real time? I would imaging that Yahoo Alerts would have to do some kind of poling in order to make that happen. That’s how InfoRSS firefox pluging works. I don’t think RSS pushes data. Did you ever get anywhere with this.