Find Video Favorites With Google Alerts
Google has added a video option to Google Alerts giving you a way to easily find new videos on topics that interest you.
For those not familiar with Google Alerts, it works something like the RSS feeds Google offers on some search service — notably Google News, Blog Search and Google Video. However, rather than dumping your results into an RSS feed, Google Alerts notifies you of new content via e-mail. Options include being notified “as-it-happens” or in daily/weekly digests.
There’s plenty of ways you can use Google Alerts — such as monitoring a breaking news story — and alerts are helpful for search areas that don’t offer RSS results feeds, or if you simply don’t like RSS notification.
Perhaps even better than the new Video Alerts, Google has created a new catch-all alert category that will combine results from three search engines — web, news and blogs — making it easier to track topics across a broad spectrum.
The chief disadvantage of alerts as opposed to straight RSS feeds is that alerts only include the top results and are sorted by relevance. Unlike RSS feeds, there’s no way to sort alerts by date. For some this won’t be a concern, but in cases like tracking breaking news date-based sorting is key.
Still, the new Google Alerts for video are a handy way to find obscure movies on subjects that interest you, for instance — here’s a link to all the videos from the ongoing DEMO 07 conference.
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