As explained, Google alert is a notification service delivering news alerts straight to your email address which is a good way to keep up to date with the latest news in your Niche.

You do not need a gmail email address for this as you can register any address.

It's good as you can set up the alerts not just to receive news as you can also choose blogs, videos or new publications in various groups.

You can set up an alert once a day or once a week where google will monitor and alert you to your keyword phrase.

In any one go you can set up a maximum of 10 alerts per on session and once confirmed you can choose another 10.

The maximum amount of searches per email address is 1000 so you have ample amount of alerts. I advice you do not saturate your searches as you will have too many to go through.