I loved Google Alerts, until it worked. So, I was forced to create my own notifier (in the fastest possible way) and I wrote a basic python script that for my particular case, does the job pretty well.

The idea is the following: we search Google for our interested keyword/phrase, get the results back, find the total number of results, compare this number to our previous number of results (saved somewhere on a file), if greater: send email and save the bigger number on our file to use it for the next comparison. You can put this script on a crontab or, if in Windows, check Z-cron, and schedule it to run invisibly, say, every hour.

After the notification, I would go to Google and check the last 24 hour results to see what’s going on.

Below is the python script that searches for “Nard Ndoka” and sends an email to nardndoka@gmail.com when some page mentions this name. To use the script change the URL, email credentials, file paths, accordingly.

import urllib2 import re from bs4 import BeautifulSoup import smtplib def remove_html_markup(s): tag = False quote = False out = "" for c in s: if c == '<' and not quote: tag = True elif c == '>' and not quote: tag = False elif (c == '"' or c == "'") and tag: quote = not quote elif not tag: out = out + c return out url = "https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Nard+Ndoka%22"; #url to search, change accordingly opener = urllib2.build_opener() opener.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0')] find_html = opener.open(url).read() soupg = BeautifulSoup(find_html) results = soupg.findAll("div", { "id" : "resultStats" }).__str__() text = remove_html_markup(results) #remove html tags final = re.sub(r"\D", "", text) #remove non-digit characters with open("C:\Users\user\Desktop\searched.txt") as f: value = f.read() if int(final)<=int(value): print "No new results" else: f = open("C:\Users\user\Desktop\searched.txt", "w") f.write(final) f.close() print "New results. New results. Sending mail.." def send_email2(): import smtplib gmail_user = "nardndoka@gmail.com" gmail_pwd = "password" FROM = 'nardndoka@gmail.com' TO = ['nardndoka@gmail.com'] #must be a list SUBJECT = "New Alert" TEXT = "Google Search number was changed for Nard Ndoka. Now is ", final # Prepare actual message message = """\From: %s

To: %s

Subject: %s



%s """ % (FROM, ", ".join(TO), SUBJECT, TEXT) try: #server = smtplib.SMTP(SERVER) server = smtplib.SMTP("smtp.gmail.com", 587) #or port 465 doesn't seem to work! server.ehlo() server.starttls() server.login(gmail_user, gmail_pwd) server.sendmail(FROM, TO, message) #server.quit() server.close() print 'Successfully sent the mail' except: print "Failed to send mail" send_email2()