Google provides an alert service for monitoring various keywords in it’s search index as well as news, blogs and other properties it owns. This can be very useful for monitoring online reputation. Here are 10 easy steps to create a Mega Google alerts RSS feed using Yahoo PIPES.
1. Sign up or Login to Yahoo! pipes
2. Click on “create a pipe”
3. Open the sources drop down on the left and select the “fetch feed” block and drag it to your work area. Click the “plus” button in this block and add all the Google alerts URLs. You can get these from your Google alerts account by selecting the RSS option.
4. Open the operators drop down tab on the left and select a “filter” block and drag it onto the workspace.
5. Add some pattern matching rules. For example, if you want to filter out press releases you can create a rule with a negative text match on “press release” in both content and/or title.
6. Connect the blocks by clicking and holding the little dot in the feeds block and drag it to the filter block. Then click the filter block dot and drag that to the “pipe output” block that will have been auto-created.
7. Save your Yahoo PIPE and give it a name.
8. Double-click the “output” block to get your output at the bottom of the screen. From there you can tweak your filter settings to help filter content.
9. Finally, go back to “My Pipes” where you can get the combined RSS URL for your Mega Google alert which can be found in the top right hand corner of the output block.
10. Plug the newly created Mega Google Alerts feed in your favourite RSS reader and enjoy!
That’s it folks, easy peasy, a great way to monitor multiple Google alerts in one RSS feed using the fantastic Yahoo PIPES application!
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[...] Yahoo Pipes: Yahoo provides a plethora of RSS ”PIPES” that you can use to monior almost anything! The best way to use PIPES is to browse through existing ones and clone the one you like then use its feed. For more info on this check out my blog post on how to create a Yahoo PIPE. [...]