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Vanilla wafers to Google Blogoscoped, which tipped me to Google’s new alert services for its Google Videos property.

Google Alerts are available at http://www.google.com/alerts . If I recall correctly, Google Alerts started out with News, but now you can track News, Blogs, Web, Google Video, and Google Groups. (And, of course, there’s “Comprehensive”, if you want to search everything.)

My first thought about this was, “This is nice, but not narrow enough.” Say I wanted to search for Carol Burnett Show episodes on Google Video. I want them to be at least four minutes long but less than 20, because if I laugh at Tim Conway for more than 20 minutes I might run out of air. I can do that with Google Video’s advanced search by specifying a duration. But I’m not sure that the duration will carry over to the Google Alert, should I choose the link at the bottom of the search results.

So the solution is to find the syntax for doing the advanced searches without using the advanced search page. As you might expect, the syntax for duration is duration: (duration can be short, medium, or long.) Site restriction is site:, of course. So this search, given to Google Alerts, should do what I want:

Carol Burnett Show duration:medium

We’ll see. Make sure when you’re using the video syntax that you’re only getting alerts for video!

I got an e-mailed question about this a week or so ago, and I wanted to go ahead and mention it here in case anyone else is having the same problem.

The person who e-mailed me wanted to be able to watch press releases for certain keywords and get an RSS feed of the results. You can do this through Kebberfegg, but perhaps you want to watch JUST press releases and you’re not much interested in anything else.

In that case you can use Google News and its very cool but little discussed source: syntax. This syntax narrows down a search to a single source (or more if you use OR.) So let’s say you were at http://news.google.com/ and you decided you wanted to monitor press releases for the keyword Wii.

The first thing to do would be to figure out what Google calls your particular source. A good way to do this is to search for the name of the publication/source in addition to they keyword. So if I searched Google News for Wii Business Wire Google would show me, in the query box of the search results page:

wii source:business_wire__press_release_

That’s the query for searching BW releases with the keyword Wii. But we want PR Newswire too. So I run the search wii PR Newswire and this time I only get three search results, with no source syntax. However I do get a note on the query results page:

Search news source PR Newswire (press release) for wii.

So I click on that link and get wii source:pr_newswire__press_release_, with slightly more results. The next step is to combine those two sources together with the OR syntax:

wii ( source:business_wire__press_release_ OR source:pr_newswire__press_release_ )

Run this search and at the moment you’ll get about 60 results. This being a Google News search you can then turn this into either an e-mail alert or an RSS feed.

Now you have a quick and easy way to monitor press releases.

For extra credit you can also monitor Market Wire ( source:market_wire__press_release_ ), PR Web ( source:pr_web__press_release_ ) or Emediawire ( source:emediawire__press_release_ ).

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