Since the earliest days of Eventful, we've had a feature that let you save a search that the system would run on an ongoing basis, emailing you the results hourly, daily, or weekly.
We recently improved that feature and made it a lot easier to create and manage saved searches.
I'd like to take a moment to show you how the feature works and how you can start tracking events you're interested in.
It Starts With a Search
The way to create a saved search is by first going and searching for something. For example, you're on the home page and you want to create a saved search for "technology" events in "San Francisco". Type "technology" in the what box and "San Francisco" in the where box and click the Search button. That takes you to the search results which might look something like this:
I've highlighted the green "Save this search" button. You'll only see it if you're signed in to Eventful first. If you're not, then you first need to sign in or register, then do a search, and view the results. To save the search, just click the green button.
A dialog box appears with a small form providing you with a way to name this search and 
specify how often you want to be emailed with updates. The default notification setting is "daily" but you can also specify hourly, weekly, or never (the latter disables any email notifications from going out).
There's a link called "Show more options" that you can click to expand the form to display additional options. When you click "Show more options" you'll see the form expand, and the link text will change to say "Show fewer options". If you click the link again, the form will shrink back to the smaller size:
The expanded form lets you customize the "what", "where", and "when" search keywords, as well as what category, if any, you want to limit the search to, how you want the results sorted, and whether you want to limit the search to a particular geographical radius.
The possible "sort by" settings are revealed in the pull-down menu. The default setting is "date", meaning the search results will be sorted by date.
The possible "Within" settings are revealed in the pull-down menu. 
The default setting is "25 miles", which means the search engine will limit the results to events that are happening within 25 miles of whatever you have specified in the "where" field. This can be particularly useful if you want to find nearby events, for instance, within 5 miles of your zip code, for example. Likewise, for more distant events you might be willing to drive to, you can set a distance up to 100 miles.
The category pull-down menu lets you specify a particular category to limit the search results to, if you want. But by default, the system will search all of Eventful without limit to any one category.
Before you can save the search, you'll want to name it. We suggest you give it a name that is reflective of what the search is about. So in our example, let's use "my-tech-search" as the name, and click "Save".
You're all done! The search is now saved in your My Eventful records, and if you specified any type of email notification, the system will send you an email if there are any results that match.
Finally, you can see the list of your saved searches by clicking on the "my eventful" tab in the navigation bar (again, you'll need to be signed in first).
In the "Saved searches" section you'll see your saved search named "my-tech-search". If you click it, the system will go run the search, and you can modify the settings if you wish (look just above the search results for a blue header that says "This search is saved as my-tech-search" with a "modify" link just to the right of it).
Be sure to try out Saved Search. It's incredibly handy for tracking all kinds of events you want to know about but don't want to have to keep coming back to Eventful and manually searching for. Let Eventful do the work on your behalf with Saved Searches!
