Smarter Travel Making Travel Planning MUCH Easier

I have spent so many hours trying to find the cheapest flights.  I’ve started at travelocity, gone to hotwire, then orbitz — and then gone back and missed a price on a flight.  Aaaarggghh!  Here’s a geat site that represents the best of the web by creating a portal to look at all of the major travel sites at one site.

1.  Go to Smarter Travel (http://www.smartertravel.com).

2.  Under Travel Tools click on “Compare Prices”

That’s pretty much it. Phew!

Google Alerts Part II

if you already have Google alerts set and want to change what kinds of sites are searched, here are instructions for changing them from just news to comprehensive if you also was to monitor blogs and websites.

Go to Google
Go to Alerts
Click on “Manage your Account”
Log in
See your list of alerts
Click on edit for the first one
Click edit
Switch type of News to Comprehensive

Now your Google Alerts will include news articles, web site postings, groups and blogs.

Blog searches

I’ve been asked by a couple of folks why certainly news items or web posts haven’t shown up on their Google Alerts. Here’s why: When you sign up for Google Alerts, beneath search terms is a box that has a drop down menu for the type of search. You can search news, blogs, web sites, groups or all of the above (comprehensive.) If you initially selected just news, then the only Google Alerts you will receive are the articles from the particular news sites that Google searches within the time period you suggest. However, if you change the type to comprehensive you’ll get the same number of emails that now includes web sites, blogs and news articles that mention your topic.

But, I have an alternative search tool just for blogs. Technorati.com (http://technorati.com) is a website that just searches blogs. Technorati was the first blog search site, it has a wide variety of ways to search blogs, and it was started by my friend Micah Sifty’s brother David. But, alas, I am not aware of a way to have the searches brought right into your inbox only onto your desktop if you’re using Google or Yahoo as your home page.

Happy searching, but beware, it’s addictive!