Google Reader can now watch pages for changes.

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swirt

Forum founder. Former Owner.
Joined
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Many of you probably use google reader for keeping up with your favorite blogs or news sites. (It reads rss feeds and posts the new appearances to your reader page.) It now has the ability of tracking pages and alerting you if they change.
Why is this useful?
  1. You have a seasonal restaurant, attraction, event ... in town that changes its hours based on the time of year ... have google reader watch their "hours of operation" page for changes.
  2. You have a yearly event that only updates its website once to reveal the new schedule or lineup.
  3. Basically you can have it watch any PAGE (not the entire site) for anything guest related that you might want to be aware of.
http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2010/01/follow-changes-to-any-website.html
 
Thank you for that.
Steve, if you have a moment, I was alerted to Google Squared yesterday and am not really sure how or if this would be useful to me, I was unsuccessful in making it work worthwhile. Have you seen it or tried it? http://www.google.com/squared
 
Thank you for that.
Steve, if you have a moment, I was alerted to Google Squared yesterday and am not really sure how or if this would be useful to me, I was unsuccessful in making it work worthwhile. Have you seen it or tried it? http://www.google.com/squared.
Google squared is primarily for lists of things. Example: Elvis songs generates a table of elvis songs which you can then sort by column or narrow by characteristics like Genre. Or you can add columns like "instrument"
From a B&B point of view it is interesting to see searches like Sarasota FL b&b. (yes I am wishing I was on a beach some place warm) the information is kind of all over the place but it is cool that you can click an x and make a listing go away, or make a column that you find irrelavant disappear like "style" or add a column like "wi-fi hotspot".
It has potential to be a great way to generate a list of the items you find useful and remove the "clutter" of info you are not interested in. This would be a very cool model for Bedandbreakfast.com or bbonline or one of the other directories to emulate. It would make sorting through and narrowing down all the possible places to stay very user friendly, and very powerful for the repeat user.
I don't think the majority of people are going to use Gsquared any time soon...the results take time to digest and if you type in a search for something that is not really "list" type material the results are pretty unusable. But for the right thing (and B&B's could very easily be the RIGHT thing) it is pretty cool. I need more time to play with it and get a better grasp of what influences the results. Searching different towns gives inconsistent info in the generated columns. Clicking on any cell in the table usually indicates where the info came from (TA, bedandbreakfast.com, inn's website, Frommers ...)
It is a neat experiment, and I think it is a cool tool in Google's lab, but given the qwirkiness of it, I don't think it is the easy method that most travelers will use. The search right now only seems to work for towns, it falls apart if you type in a region like Finger Lakes B&B.
 
There must be some usefulness for it to be developed in this way, I am not grasping it yet, I tossed a couple things into the square and the first few are just really search results for the words I put in and then it digresses into nothing of interest at all. I know there must be more to it.
Appreciate your feedback if you figure out it usefulness to an innkeeper or traveler I would love to hear it. Google maps has lists so maybe this is an added feature along those lines for someone wanting to collect all the data and compile it? Again, I am clueless on this as you can see.
confused_smile.gif
 
Thank you for that.
Steve, if you have a moment, I was alerted to Google Squared yesterday and am not really sure how or if this would be useful to me, I was unsuccessful in making it work worthwhile. Have you seen it or tried it? http://www.google.com/squared.
I forgot to add, I see some promise in it for creating tools to give to your guests. Do a search for restaurants in your town. Delete the places you wouldn't recomment. Add in a couple of columns that might be usefull like price range or hours ... and then print it out and make a copy or two or 50. You can save it to come back to, or you can even save it as a spreadsheet file you could then open and edit ...add your own columns and notes. Pretty easy and professional looking.
Google Squared could serve as both a marketing tool (like a search engine) and an innkeeper's tool for guests. It is usable right off the bat as an innkeeper tool.
 
Thank you for that.
Steve, if you have a moment, I was alerted to Google Squared yesterday and am not really sure how or if this would be useful to me, I was unsuccessful in making it work worthwhile. Have you seen it or tried it? http://www.google.com/squared.
Google squared is primarily for lists of things. Example: Elvis songs generates a table of elvis songs which you can then sort by column or narrow by characteristics like Genre. Or you can add columns like "instrument"
From a B&B point of view it is interesting to see searches like Sarasota FL b&b. (yes I am wishing I was on a beach some place warm) the information is kind of all over the place but it is cool that you can click an x and make a listing go away, or make a column that you find irrelavant disappear like "style" or add a column like "wi-fi hotspot".
It has potential to be a great way to generate a list of the items you find useful and remove the "clutter" of info you are not interested in. This would be a very cool model for Bedandbreakfast.com or bbonline or one of the other directories to emulate. It would make sorting through and narrowing down all the possible places to stay very user friendly, and very powerful for the repeat user.
I don't think the majority of people are going to use Gsquared any time soon...the results take time to digest and if you type in a search for something that is not really "list" type material the results are pretty unusable. But for the right thing (and B&B's could very easily be the RIGHT thing) it is pretty cool. I need more time to play with it and get a better grasp of what influences the results. Searching different towns gives inconsistent info in the generated columns. Clicking on any cell in the table usually indicates where the info came from (TA, bedandbreakfast.com, inn's website, Frommers ...)
It is a neat experiment, and I think it is a cool tool in Google's lab, but given the qwirkiness of it, I don't think it is the easy method that most travelers will use. The search right now only seems to work for towns, it falls apart if you type in a region like Finger Lakes B&B.
.
Since when is P'ok in the Finger Lakes? I see what you mean.
 
Thank you for that.
Steve, if you have a moment, I was alerted to Google Squared yesterday and am not really sure how or if this would be useful to me, I was unsuccessful in making it work worthwhile. Have you seen it or tried it? http://www.google.com/squared.
I forgot to add, I see some promise in it for creating tools to give to your guests. Do a search for restaurants in your town. Delete the places you wouldn't recomment. Add in a couple of columns that might be usefull like price range or hours ... and then print it out and make a copy or two or 50. You can save it to come back to, or you can even save it as a spreadsheet file you could then open and edit ...add your own columns and notes. Pretty easy and professional looking.
Google Squared could serve as both a marketing tool (like a search engine) and an innkeeper's tool for guests. It is usable right off the bat as an innkeeper tool.
.
Thanks swirt. That's some very useful info to have.
 
Thank you for that.
Steve, if you have a moment, I was alerted to Google Squared yesterday and am not really sure how or if this would be useful to me, I was unsuccessful in making it work worthwhile. Have you seen it or tried it? http://www.google.com/squared.
I forgot to add, I see some promise in it for creating tools to give to your guests. Do a search for restaurants in your town. Delete the places you wouldn't recomment. Add in a couple of columns that might be usefull like price range or hours ... and then print it out and make a copy or two or 50. You can save it to come back to, or you can even save it as a spreadsheet file you could then open and edit ...add your own columns and notes. Pretty easy and professional looking.
Google Squared could serve as both a marketing tool (like a search engine) and an innkeeper's tool for guests. It is usable right off the bat as an innkeeper tool.
.
A little squirrely. I just did my town, state B&B and got a list of hotels. So they may be advertising a 'B&B pkg.' OTOH, they also list places that are long gone. And it stretched the parameters a bit to list places that are not in this town. That may be because those properties have listed themselves somewhere as being in this town.
And I noticed a few places had a link to wego for prices. Not sure where wego is drawing their info from because if I click to back up to the town page it gives me every town in this country with the same name, and some that are not in this country.
It looks like they get that wego info from Webervations, tho, as the only places with that link use Webervations. (But all of that is more a comment on wego thatn G2.)
 
Thank you for that.
Steve, if you have a moment, I was alerted to Google Squared yesterday and am not really sure how or if this would be useful to me, I was unsuccessful in making it work worthwhile. Have you seen it or tried it? http://www.google.com/squared.
I forgot to add, I see some promise in it for creating tools to give to your guests. Do a search for restaurants in your town. Delete the places you wouldn't recomment. Add in a couple of columns that might be usefull like price range or hours ... and then print it out and make a copy or two or 50. You can save it to come back to, or you can even save it as a spreadsheet file you could then open and edit ...add your own columns and notes. Pretty easy and professional looking.
Google Squared could serve as both a marketing tool (like a search engine) and an innkeeper's tool for guests. It is usable right off the bat as an innkeeper tool.
.
A little squirrely. I just did my town, state B&B and got a list of hotels. So they may be advertising a 'B&B pkg.' OTOH, they also list places that are long gone. And it stretched the parameters a bit to list places that are not in this town. That may be because those properties have listed themselves somewhere as being in this town.
And I noticed a few places had a link to wego for prices. Not sure where wego is drawing their info from because if I click to back up to the town page it gives me every town in this country with the same name, and some that are not in this country.
It looks like they get that wego info from Webervations, tho, as the only places with that link use Webervations. (But all of that is more a comment on wego thatn G2.)
.
And it stretched the parameters a bit to list places that are not in this town. That may be because those properties have listed themselves somewhere as being in this town.
I think it is more likely that it is tied in with Google Local so it knows what towns are near what other towns. The other possibility is that it is using a site like bedandbreakfast.com and crawling the links to nearby towns... but I bet it is more likely connected to google local for geolocation.
Are the places that it lists for you that are long gone, still listed in google local?
 
Thank you for that.
Steve, if you have a moment, I was alerted to Google Squared yesterday and am not really sure how or if this would be useful to me, I was unsuccessful in making it work worthwhile. Have you seen it or tried it? http://www.google.com/squared.
Google squared is primarily for lists of things. Example: Elvis songs generates a table of elvis songs which you can then sort by column or narrow by characteristics like Genre. Or you can add columns like "instrument"
From a B&B point of view it is interesting to see searches like Sarasota FL b&b. (yes I am wishing I was on a beach some place warm) the information is kind of all over the place but it is cool that you can click an x and make a listing go away, or make a column that you find irrelavant disappear like "style" or add a column like "wi-fi hotspot".
It has potential to be a great way to generate a list of the items you find useful and remove the "clutter" of info you are not interested in. This would be a very cool model for Bedandbreakfast.com or bbonline or one of the other directories to emulate. It would make sorting through and narrowing down all the possible places to stay very user friendly, and very powerful for the repeat user.
I don't think the majority of people are going to use Gsquared any time soon...the results take time to digest and if you type in a search for something that is not really "list" type material the results are pretty unusable. But for the right thing (and B&B's could very easily be the RIGHT thing) it is pretty cool. I need more time to play with it and get a better grasp of what influences the results. Searching different towns gives inconsistent info in the generated columns. Clicking on any cell in the table usually indicates where the info came from (TA, bedandbreakfast.com, inn's website, Frommers ...)
It is a neat experiment, and I think it is a cool tool in Google's lab, but given the qwirkiness of it, I don't think it is the easy method that most travelers will use. The search right now only seems to work for towns, it falls apart if you type in a region like Finger Lakes B&B.
.
Since when is P'ok in the Finger Lakes? I see what you mean.
.
Since when is P'ok in the Finger Lakes? I see what you mean.
Right, its not even close. ...heck they even talk a different dialect than we do here LOL.
I should point out that for years google local didn't understand the concept of regions either...but NOW IT DOES. (noticed this a month or so back) So it would not surprise me if Gsquared gained that ability in the future.
 
Thank you for that.
Steve, if you have a moment, I was alerted to Google Squared yesterday and am not really sure how or if this would be useful to me, I was unsuccessful in making it work worthwhile. Have you seen it or tried it? http://www.google.com/squared.
I forgot to add, I see some promise in it for creating tools to give to your guests. Do a search for restaurants in your town. Delete the places you wouldn't recomment. Add in a couple of columns that might be usefull like price range or hours ... and then print it out and make a copy or two or 50. You can save it to come back to, or you can even save it as a spreadsheet file you could then open and edit ...add your own columns and notes. Pretty easy and professional looking.
Google Squared could serve as both a marketing tool (like a search engine) and an innkeeper's tool for guests. It is usable right off the bat as an innkeeper tool.
.
A little squirrely. I just did my town, state B&B and got a list of hotels. So they may be advertising a 'B&B pkg.' OTOH, they also list places that are long gone. And it stretched the parameters a bit to list places that are not in this town. That may be because those properties have listed themselves somewhere as being in this town.
And I noticed a few places had a link to wego for prices. Not sure where wego is drawing their info from because if I click to back up to the town page it gives me every town in this country with the same name, and some that are not in this country.
It looks like they get that wego info from Webervations, tho, as the only places with that link use Webervations. (But all of that is more a comment on wego thatn G2.)
.
And it stretched the parameters a bit to list places that are not in this town. That may be because those properties have listed themselves somewhere as being in this town.
I think it is more likely that it is tied in with Google Local so it knows what towns are near what other towns. The other possibility is that it is using a site like bedandbreakfast.com and crawling the links to nearby towns... but I bet it is more likely connected to google local for geolocation.
Are the places that it lists for you that are long gone, still listed in google local?
.
swirt said:
And it stretched the parameters a bit to list places that are not in this town. That may be because those properties have listed themselves somewhere as being in this town.
I think it is more likely that it is tied in with Google Local so it knows what towns are near what other towns. The other possibility is that it is using a site like bedandbreakfast.com and crawling the links to nearby towns... but I bet it is more likely connected to google local for geolocation.
Are the places that it lists for you that are long gone, still listed in google local?
Exactly the same places in exactly the same order as Google Local. With the duplicate listings for some of the places. Including the listing of places outside town.
 
Thank you for that.
Steve, if you have a moment, I was alerted to Google Squared yesterday and am not really sure how or if this would be useful to me, I was unsuccessful in making it work worthwhile. Have you seen it or tried it? http://www.google.com/squared.
Google squared is primarily for lists of things. Example: Elvis songs generates a table of elvis songs which you can then sort by column or narrow by characteristics like Genre. Or you can add columns like "instrument"
From a B&B point of view it is interesting to see searches like Sarasota FL b&b. (yes I am wishing I was on a beach some place warm) the information is kind of all over the place but it is cool that you can click an x and make a listing go away, or make a column that you find irrelavant disappear like "style" or add a column like "wi-fi hotspot".
It has potential to be a great way to generate a list of the items you find useful and remove the "clutter" of info you are not interested in. This would be a very cool model for Bedandbreakfast.com or bbonline or one of the other directories to emulate. It would make sorting through and narrowing down all the possible places to stay very user friendly, and very powerful for the repeat user.
I don't think the majority of people are going to use Gsquared any time soon...the results take time to digest and if you type in a search for something that is not really "list" type material the results are pretty unusable. But for the right thing (and B&B's could very easily be the RIGHT thing) it is pretty cool. I need more time to play with it and get a better grasp of what influences the results. Searching different towns gives inconsistent info in the generated columns. Clicking on any cell in the table usually indicates where the info came from (TA, bedandbreakfast.com, inn's website, Frommers ...)
It is a neat experiment, and I think it is a cool tool in Google's lab, but given the qwirkiness of it, I don't think it is the easy method that most travelers will use. The search right now only seems to work for towns, it falls apart if you type in a region like Finger Lakes B&B.
.
Since when is P'ok in the Finger Lakes? I see what you mean.
.
Since when is P'ok in the Finger Lakes? I see what you mean.
Right, its not even close. ...heck they even talk a different dialect than we do here LOL.
I should point out that for years google local didn't understand the concept of regions either...but NOW IT DOES. (noticed this a month or so back) So it would not surprise me if Gsquared gained that ability in the future.
.
Funny, when we moved to that area in the 60's no one sounded like us, now they all do, and I don't sound like that anymore. Even people who were born there way back when sound like they moved there.
 
Thank you for that.
Steve, if you have a moment, I was alerted to Google Squared yesterday and am not really sure how or if this would be useful to me, I was unsuccessful in making it work worthwhile. Have you seen it or tried it? http://www.google.com/squared.
I forgot to add, I see some promise in it for creating tools to give to your guests. Do a search for restaurants in your town. Delete the places you wouldn't recomment. Add in a couple of columns that might be usefull like price range or hours ... and then print it out and make a copy or two or 50. You can save it to come back to, or you can even save it as a spreadsheet file you could then open and edit ...add your own columns and notes. Pretty easy and professional looking.
Google Squared could serve as both a marketing tool (like a search engine) and an innkeeper's tool for guests. It is usable right off the bat as an innkeeper tool.
.
A little squirrely. I just did my town, state B&B and got a list of hotels. So they may be advertising a 'B&B pkg.' OTOH, they also list places that are long gone. And it stretched the parameters a bit to list places that are not in this town. That may be because those properties have listed themselves somewhere as being in this town.
And I noticed a few places had a link to wego for prices. Not sure where wego is drawing their info from because if I click to back up to the town page it gives me every town in this country with the same name, and some that are not in this country.
It looks like they get that wego info from Webervations, tho, as the only places with that link use Webervations. (But all of that is more a comment on wego thatn G2.)
.
And it stretched the parameters a bit to list places that are not in this town. That may be because those properties have listed themselves somewhere as being in this town.
I think it is more likely that it is tied in with Google Local so it knows what towns are near what other towns. The other possibility is that it is using a site like bedandbreakfast.com and crawling the links to nearby towns... but I bet it is more likely connected to google local for geolocation.
Are the places that it lists for you that are long gone, still listed in google local?
.
swirt said:
And it stretched the parameters a bit to list places that are not in this town. That may be because those properties have listed themselves somewhere as being in this town.
I think it is more likely that it is tied in with Google Local so it knows what towns are near what other towns. The other possibility is that it is using a site like bedandbreakfast.com and crawling the links to nearby towns... but I bet it is more likely connected to google local for geolocation.
Are the places that it lists for you that are long gone, still listed in google local?
Exactly the same places in exactly the same order as Google Local. With the duplicate listings for some of the places. Including the listing of places outside town.
.
Exactly the same places in exactly the same order as Google Local. With the duplicate listings for some of the places. Including the listing of places outside town.
Great. Those are the kind of details that really help reveal some of the method behind the madness.
 
Thank you for that.
Steve, if you have a moment, I was alerted to Google Squared yesterday and am not really sure how or if this would be useful to me, I was unsuccessful in making it work worthwhile. Have you seen it or tried it? http://www.google.com/squared.
I forgot to add, I see some promise in it for creating tools to give to your guests. Do a search for restaurants in your town. Delete the places you wouldn't recomment. Add in a couple of columns that might be usefull like price range or hours ... and then print it out and make a copy or two or 50. You can save it to come back to, or you can even save it as a spreadsheet file you could then open and edit ...add your own columns and notes. Pretty easy and professional looking.
Google Squared could serve as both a marketing tool (like a search engine) and an innkeeper's tool for guests. It is usable right off the bat as an innkeeper tool.
.
A little squirrely. I just did my town, state B&B and got a list of hotels. So they may be advertising a 'B&B pkg.' OTOH, they also list places that are long gone. And it stretched the parameters a bit to list places that are not in this town. That may be because those properties have listed themselves somewhere as being in this town.
And I noticed a few places had a link to wego for prices. Not sure where wego is drawing their info from because if I click to back up to the town page it gives me every town in this country with the same name, and some that are not in this country.
It looks like they get that wego info from Webervations, tho, as the only places with that link use Webervations. (But all of that is more a comment on wego thatn G2.)
.
And it stretched the parameters a bit to list places that are not in this town. That may be because those properties have listed themselves somewhere as being in this town.
I think it is more likely that it is tied in with Google Local so it knows what towns are near what other towns. The other possibility is that it is using a site like bedandbreakfast.com and crawling the links to nearby towns... but I bet it is more likely connected to google local for geolocation.
Are the places that it lists for you that are long gone, still listed in google local?
.
swirt said:
And it stretched the parameters a bit to list places that are not in this town. That may be because those properties have listed themselves somewhere as being in this town.
I think it is more likely that it is tied in with Google Local so it knows what towns are near what other towns. The other possibility is that it is using a site like bedandbreakfast.com and crawling the links to nearby towns... but I bet it is more likely connected to google local for geolocation.
Are the places that it lists for you that are long gone, still listed in google local?
Exactly the same places in exactly the same order as Google Local. With the duplicate listings for some of the places. Including the listing of places outside town.
.
Exactly the same places in exactly the same order as Google Local. With the duplicate listings for some of the places. Including the listing of places outside town.
Great. Those are the kind of details that really help reveal some of the method behind the madness.
.
swirt said:
Exactly the same places in exactly the same order as Google Local. With the duplicate listings for some of the places. Including the listing of places outside town.
Great. Those are the kind of details that really help reveal some of the method behind the madness.
I was wondering about the reviews. Latest reviews anywhere online? Most reviews source? There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason to it.
 
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