Another google security/privacy issue?

So I'm poking around with Google Alerts, pointing it at bloglines subscription addresses. I'm not logged in since I'm making individual addresses per query, and need to enter an email address. There's an issue where I haven't received the confirmations (which is probably due to bloglines' flakiness lately), so figure I'll enter them again just in case. I enter one, and it comes back with "You've already created this Google Alert. Please enter a different search.". Is it really that easy to check whether someone has subscribed to a google alert on something? I suppose they could be tracking me since google tends to track everything, but you'd think it would have thrown an error at the different addresses or pretended to remember me in that case. So wipe out all cookies in that browser, and try again. Wow...