Craigslist is my goto site for second-hand gear. Concert tickets, computer hardware, gaming systems… No matter what I’m looking for I know eventually someone will put one up for sale.

Scanning through endless listings of unrelated garbage though is boring. That’s why I use Google Alerts to do the boring work for me. Google Alerts keeps an eye on Craigslist and sends me an email whenever keywords that I’m interested in are posted anywhere on the site.

If you’ve never heard of it before, Google Alerts is like Google Search on a schedule. You enter a search term much like you would in Google search. But instead of giving you immediate results, Alerts watches the web for new matches to appear. Whenever new results are posted to the web for your search term Alerts sends you an email. The email includes links to the sites that mention your term along with a snippet of surrounding text for context.

So how does this help you watch Craigslist? Well, one of the cool things about Alerts is that you can use all kinds of Google search operators. For instance, the Site: keyword limits a search to a single domain. So if I put in “Mac mini” site:http://philadelphia.craigslist.org as my alert search, new posts with the phrase “Mac mini” will be emailed to me as they pop up. But only results in the http://philadelphia.craigslist.org domain will be included.

Swap out “Mac mini” for whatever it is you’re looking for and you’ve got yourself a Philly Craigslist Alert. Check out the list of supported Google search operators to refine your own alerts. You don’t even need a Google account to setup an alert. Any email address will do. And if immediate emails aren’t your thing, there’s a daily digest mode for those low-demand things on your wish list.