Google Alerts

[terin]

Hey, I figured I would throw out a great tip for finding stuff:

Go to google and search for Google Alerts. It is a free system that will tell you when something new comes up with whatever you type into the box.

Put yourself on your alert list for your own game in case someone writes about it. It isn't 100% but it will certainly give you some good information that you may have otherwise missed.

-Joe

[Sillysoft]

You can also get alerted by some of the blog/web tracking services. They create a custom RSS feed for you with links to anything they find mentioning your stuff. Very useful to have.

http://technorati.com
http://feedster.com

[TomSpilman]

Here is a trick i added to our product using Google Alerts. I'm sure someone has done this trick before.

We use ASProtect SKE (small key edition) (http://www.asprotect.com/asprotectske.html) to secure our product. As part of the integration i added an additional 6 character section to the unlock code. This additional section will always be one of a few pre-generated sequences that are hard coded into the EXE and into the key generator.

I then setup a Google Alert to fire when any one of these 6 character sequences turns up in their database. Of course ahead of time i made sure that these sequences did not yield any false results.

So far it hasn't given us any alerts, but our app isn't very widely distributed.

[baegsi]

Yeah, it's really unbelievable how many beta-services google implements hidden from the public. Well, the IPO money has to go somewhere.

But these guys must have incredible traffic: http://www.googlealert.com/ They're ranked before http://www.google.com/alerts