I am monitoring a site for search results using a macro. The macro selects the option to show the most recent result first, and that’s what I notify off of. However, if a previous result falls off the list, then an older result will move back into that position, and alert me again, as if it is a new result. I want to avoid receiving that “duplicate” alert since I’ve already been notified about it.
Is there a way to tell Distill to avoid sending a notification if the URL of the page being monitored was sent in a previous notification and has already been alerted on before? That would solve my issue.
use the condition “text doesn’t match any previous text”. it was designed to handled cases like this and will mute the alerts if the content reverts back to an older content for short period of time. check out the following article for more information:
To add more context, the search results page I am monitoring lists items for sale and is sorted by most recent item first. I am monitoring the “title” field of that page which is the item being listed, and links to the item page. Whenever the title changes to a different title, the assumption is a new item has been posted, and I get alerted with a direct link to the item page in the body of the email alert. If I set the setting you are referring to, I won’t get alerted if another item is listed with the same title, is that correct? What I am trying to do is not notify when the item page URL matches a previous notification, because that would be a unique identifier and would prevent not getting notified of future items that happen to match because they have the same title.
Not for me, because the urls are just an random string after the domain. This is why I monitor the titles instead. What would work for me is if distill could keep a history of the urls it’s alerted on before, and ignore alerting for urls it’s already alerted on before.
I don’t need to monitor the URLs since there is nothing helpful or descriptive in the URL itself. What would be helpful is to log the unique identifier (in this case the string after /post/ or the whole URL itself, and then have an ability to not alert on that unique identifier again. The reason - I am only watching the top search result field (position 1) and if the same item shows up again in that top spot, then I’ve already been alerted on it before an already decided to taken action on it or not. Sometimes an item will move down to the #2 spot, and then if #1 disappears (in my case, the item is sold), then item #1 disappears from search results and then item #2 moves back into the #1 spot again (because I am sorting by most recent first).
Currently, this action triggers a new Distill alert, because it’s a change in value for the #1 field. However, we wouldn’t want to use the “ignore if matches previous text” option because items are often listed with the same names (titles) and I would want to get notified in that situation. But this is where if the item string matched a previous item string, Distill would know not to alert since it was previously alerted.
As for the search results page, there is never 2 results that point to the same item. Each result is a unique item, although they could have the same name/title.
the url will always be unique even though the name is not. monitoring the product name and the product’s url should work, right? let me know if i missed anything.