mighty ape

Google Alerts For Fun and Profit

I had a request today from a customer who wanted to make a list of products he was waiting for, and to be notified when Mighty Ape had them on the site ready to order. I decided that it was going to be problematic to implement this as a Mighty Ape feature, but I did help him sort out something that works just as well, using free tools available already.

Say you wanted to be notified when Mighty Ape makes the Transformers 2: Revenge Of the Fallen Blu-Ray available, here’s how you could go about doing it.

First, construct a Google query that narrows down what you’re after.

Since you’re interested in a product, make sure you add the keyword “site:mightyape.co.nz/product” to the query. That will restrict Google to search within that directory on our site.

We’re only interested in the Blu-Ray version so add that in there, too as “blu-ray“.

Now add some keywords that describe the product. Try and stay away from being too specific, filler words, numbers and punctuation. Something like “transformers revenge fallen“.

Now, using that might turn up some strange results, from other product’s descriptions or similar. Luckily, Mighty Ape stores the product name and format all in the page title, so we can direct Google to match only that by using the “allintitle:” keyword.

So put that all together and we have:
allintitle:transformers revenge fallen “blu-ray” site:mightyape.co.nz/product

Nice. Now all we need to do is put that into a new Google Alert and Google will let you know when new documents turn up matching your query in your E-Mail inbox, or RSS feed.

Enjoy! This can easily be adapted to other sites or other queries. Anybody got any other cool examples of useful Google Alerts?

Gameplanet Store Evolves – Mighty Ape Launches!

Gameplanet Store, one of New Zealand’s last 100% NZ owned independent player in the gaming industry, has just launched the next generation of their store and undergone a complete rebranding.

The new store is called Mighty Ape and has expanded it’s already impressive product range, going from Games, DVD’s and Music to include Toys and a massive section of over 800,000 Books.

For those familiar with Gameplanet Store service, you’ll be happy to know it’s the same shareholders with the same team (with a few additions, myself included!). So have a look around, see if there’s anything you like or any products you would like to see and let us know

Happy Shopping!

Disclaimer: I am a long time Gameplanet Store customer and Web Developer for Mighty Ape.