There are very few ways to view job openings, book a vacation, or find that perfect home without plowing through multiple websites and advertisements. Alertpedia is a useful website that saves you time by performing filtered searches based on what you're looking for. The search results are delivered in the form of a daily, weekly, or immediate email. The best part? No sign-up required.
Unlike websites like Kayak or Crazedlist, who deliver an immediate search result, Alertpedia saves you time by doing an automatic, periodical search. You can search for weather, traffic, jobs, travel, YouTube videos, and other categories.For example, if you are on a hunt for the best (cheapest) plane tickets from San Francisco to New York, fill out a one-time alert request, specify how often you'd like to be alerted, and Alertpedia takes care of the rest. You will receive weekly or daily emails with a summary of the current travel deals. This can be handy if you're booking travel in advance since it saves you time performing repeat searches on travel websites.
(Credit:
Sharon Vaknin/CNET Networks)
A great application for Alertpedia would be for moms and dads. Parents can be alerted on recent health hazards such as the recent breakout of salmonella, or tips for dealing with asthma. Alerts on product recalls, like the recent hooded sweatshirts are also valuable for the health and safety of children.
Though Alertpedia can be very practical, it does have a few weaknesses. When using the service, users should be careful about what filters they choose in their searches. A very general filter, or search term, could lead to endless results. On the other hand, a very specific term could minimize results and render the service useless.
Alertpedia is best utilized for those looking for information on an ongoing basis. Users can not filter their alerts based on travel dates, or set a specific price range for their Craig's List searches. Most importantly, the results are not delivered right away. For those looking for immediate results, other search engines would be more useful.
There will never be enough ways to search through Craigslist.
To help in the hunt, there's a new tool called Search All Craig's Lists that does the dirty work for you--scouring all the cities and countries with local Craigslists and compiling them into one index that can be searched extensively, and with ease.
It uses Google custom search, which is fast but not as precise as using Craigslist's own search tool. You can narrow down what area of the country you're in, but that's only so helpful. In my search for the video game Call of Duty 4, I got results from Seattle all the way to Reno. Knowing Google search parameters helps narrow it down even further, but it's not nearly as simple Craigslist's, which let you narrow it down by neighborhood.
Where sites like this come in handy is when it comes time to find obscure items. Something like a stamp or coin collection might be something somebody is willing to ship, whereas most goods on the service are for in-person pickups only. They can also be helpful in case you're trying to track down stolen items, especially where you're not sure how far the thief has taken your goods, which in my own personal experience was not that far. A service like this would have helped me dig through the results that much faster.
Another service that does this is Crazedlist, which keeps you inside the confines of Craigslist's search engine, and shows all of the results from all of the various cities in the same window. However the "hack" Crazedlist uses requires toggling a certain setting on your browser, which many folks may not be comfortable with.
[via Lifehacker]
See also: Find stuff faster on Craigslist--if you dare
Search All Craig's Lists lets you search through every single Craigslist all around the globe using Google custom search.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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