Google Alerts Adds Google Video Alerts

The Google Blog announced they have added Google Video into the bundle of search verticals that Google Alerts will work with.

Google Alerts will send you an email when a keyword match occurs on one of the 6 types of alerts you configure. The alerts are supported for News, Web, Blogs, Comprehensive (News, Web & Blogs combined), Video and Groups. To add Google Video to your email alerts, you can either do a search at Google Video, scroll down to the bottom and click on “Get the latest videos on [keyword phrase] with Google Alerts,” or you can go to Google Alerts and fill out the form.

Say you are a Matt Cutts junky and want to be notified as soon as he posts a video, or as soon as someone else posts a video about him. All you need to do is search on Matt Cutts at Google Video, then scroll down to the alerts link and click it. After you click on the link, it will prefill the information into the Google Alerts form. It should look something like this:

Now you can change the time intervals you want for the notifications by selecting the “How often” drop down and picking either “once a day,” “as it happens” or “once a week.”

This works with all 6 types of alert verticals. The Google Alerts FAQs explains what each alert vertical does:

• A ‘News’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.
• A ‘Web’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.
• A ‘Blogs’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.
• A ‘Comprehensive’ alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.
• A ‘Video’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.
• A ‘Groups’ alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

If you are an RSS guy like me, Google Video also has an RSS feed. The format is http://video.google.com/videofeed?type=search&q=keyword+phrase&so=0&num=20&output=rss if you prefer that route. Also see 10 Google Feeds You Should Subscribe To for other types of feeds Google provides.