Google Alerts Monitor

Monitor keywords via free web search. Use when: (1) Tracking brand or product mentions, (2) Monitoring industry keywords, (3) Researching competitors and mar...

Security Scan

The skill's files, required binaries, and environment variable are consistent with its stated purpose of fetching and formatting Google Alerts RSS feeds; nothing requested or installed is disproportionate.

Purpose & Capability

Name and description match the implementation: the scripts fetch Google Alerts RSS feeds and format results. Required binaries (bash, curl, python3) and the single env var (GOOGLE_ALERT_FEED_ID) are appropriate for this task.

Instruction Scope

SKILL.md and scripts instruct only to fetch RSS from google.com/alerts, parse XML into JSON, and format output. The instructions do not read unrelated system files, request unrelated credentials, or send data to unexpected endpoints.

Install Mechanism

No install spec or remote downloads are present; this is an instruction-only skill with included local scripts. Nothing is fetched from third-party servers at install time.

Credentials

Only a single, purpose-relevant env var (GOOGLE_ALERT_FEED_ID) is required and is referenced by the scripts and docs. The feed ID is described as non-secret; no other tokens/keys or unrelated credentials are requested.

Persistence & Privilege

always:false and default agent invocation behavior. The skill does not request permanent presence, modify other skills, or change system-wide config.

Assessment

This skill appears to do what it says: it fetches Google Alerts RSS feeds and formats them. Before installing, review the included scripts (they will be executed locally) and confirm you are comfortable making outbound requests to https://www.google.com/alerts/feeds/. The required GOOGLE_ALERT_FEED_ID is not a secret but is user-specific—do not paste sensitive credentials into references/keywords.md. Because the skill executes Python and shell code locally, run it in a controlled environment (not as root), inspect or test with non-sensitive feed IDs first, and avoid combining it with unrelated environment variables or secrets in the same shell session. If you want fully autonomous agent use, remember the agent can invoke skills by default—this skill is not force-enabled (always:false).

Keyword monitoring with Hootsuite-style output. Free, no API keys required.

What This Skill Does

• Fetches Google Alerts RSS feeds for your keywords
• Formats results into visual, social-media-style cards
• Prints clean JSON output and formatted text for use by agents or cron jobs

What this skill does NOT do: It does not save files, schedule cron jobs, or post to chat. Those integrations are handled by your agent prompt or external automation.

Keywords

Edit references/keywords.md with your own keywords. One per line.

Search Script

# Set your Google Alert feed ID (see setup-guide.md)
export GOOGLE_ALERT_FEED_ID="your_feed_id_here"

# Search a keyword
bash scripts/search.sh "your keyword" 10

Output: JSON array of results (title, link, description, published date)

Formatter Script

Takes JSON results and formats them into Hootsuite-style cards:

bash scripts/search.sh "your keyword" 10 \
  | python3 scripts/format-results.py --term "your keyword" --source google --count 10

Output Format

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
📊 YOUR KEYWORD — GOOGLE
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
👤 Result Title · 3h ago
"Description text preview truncated to 280 chars..."
↗️ https://example.com/link
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Setup

1. Create Google Alerts at google.com/alerts
2. Get the RSS feed ID from each alert's feed URL
3. Set GOOGLE_ALERT_FEED_ID in your environment or edit scripts/search.sh
4. See references/setup-guide.md for details

Scripts

• scripts/search.sh — Fetch Google Alerts RSS, output JSON
• scripts/format-results.py — Format JSON results as Hootsuite-style cards

References

• references/keywords.md — Keyword definitions
• references/setup-guide.md — Detailed setup instructions