a change to the document the changed section or search term may be colored in blue to indicate the change as another example if a search term is deleted the deleted text may be stricken thereby indicating deleted text also in block 306 the user may define an alert type such as an electronic notification to the user comprising an alert message and or an electronic link to the output document in block 308 the user may enter if desired one or more search terms in the preferred embodiment the entering of one or more search terms provides the ability to alert users only when there is a change relating to the one or more search terms in the monitored document in block 400 of fig4 raw information is extracted from the monitored document which is subject to change previously selected in block 300 of fig3 the extraction may comprise any method or combination of methods such as web crawling flat file parsing natural language processing or screen scraping in an embodiment utilizing web crawling as an extraction method in block 400 the structure of an input document e g the monitored document is analyzed to detect attributes of data elements that can be used for identification such attributes may include markup tags the absolute or relative position of the data element or the format in which the data element appears e g a heading table or indented paragraph as an example the system may detect in a court document to be monitored that attorney and party data elements are encapsulated in metadata or markup tags such as u201c lt attorney gt u201d and u201c lt party gt u201d similarly attorney and party data elements in a particular.