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!