Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Google Video Alerts

The neat Google Alert service lets you subscribe to certain search queries to get updates emailed to you. For instance, you can subscribe to mentions of your website name in Google News. The newest member in the Alerts family is Video. I subscribed to the query “google” to give this a try, setting the alert schedule to “as it happens,” and found several videos thumbnails + links in my inbox this morning.

The alerted videos come from all kinds of sources, not just Google-owned properties; along with YouTube, there’s e.g. German Clipfish.de, or Metacafe.com. However, the link will always point to the Google Video frame wrapper for displaying the actual video. Google – framing the web for outgoing links so you’ll always bookmark their site? Let’s hope this doesn’t catch on with other services of theirs, like web search.

At some places in the past, interestingly enough Google Alerts have been used to power spam blogs. Because when you hook up e.g. a Google News Alert for a high-paying AdSense keyword (say, “asbestos”), and use your Blogspot email-to-blog address, you’ve got a self-organized automatically updated blog. With the addition of Video alerts, you’d even be able to have a video blog now. The catch? The email footer will be added to every post too, and it contains a link to unsubscribe from your alert! Without any authentication, if anyone stumbles upon such a spam blog, they can unsubscribe to its alerts en masse...

[Thanks Search Engines Web!]

Google Video Alerts by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (2+14)

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