Will using condition "doesn't match any previous text" work for me as expected?

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Hi everyone :slight_smile:
I am monitoring the listings on Jimoty (a Japanese Craigslist style website) for a specific item.

When you search Jimoty for a keyword, the results are split into two sections:

  1. the currently available listings (at the top)
  2. previous/old listings that are no longer available (under the current listings)
    There is no way to exclude/hide the listings that are no longer available from the search results.

I am not able to use the Distill ‘Visual Selector’ to either only include the current listings, or to exclude the old listings. The new and old results are not divided into sections that the Visual Selector recognizes as distinct/selectable. So I have just chosen to monitor the entire page.

This creates a problem because within the old/unavailable listings of my monitored URL, there exists the exact item that I am monitoring for.

To summarize the situation:

  • I want to acquire a “rareitem 333”
  • I am monitoring the URL - jmty.jp/all/sale?button=&keyword=rareitem
  • The results of the search include mostly “rareitem 111” and rareitem 222"
  • I have a text condition to only alert me if the page contains “rareitem 333”
  • I was getting spammed with emails because the URL search results include an old/unavailable listing for a “rareitem 333”

I was able to quiet the emails by adding an “And” condition of “doesn’t match any previous text” to my existing condition.

If you have gotten this far then thank you so much - my question is as follows:

Hypothetically, if a new listing appears on the URL that I am monitoring with a title of “rareitem 333”, will I be notified?

I am hoping that I would be notified, since it would be an entirely new listing (and a ‘change’ on the URL itself) and therefore the conditions would be met?
But I have sufficient anxiety that I might not actually be notified, since the exact text phrase “rareitem 333” already exists in the change history, and therefore the “doesn’t match any previous text” might suppress the exact situation that I am monitoring for (a new currently available listing for a rareitem 333).

Can anyone ease my mind about how my alerts will behave when a new currently available listing for a rareitem 333 appears?
And if my current setup will indeed suppress a new listing, can anyone suggest an alternative method of monitoring this URL?

If you read this entire post, you are a legend and I appreciate your time.

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2

is there any other indication about what is new and what is old in the listing or are they indistinguishable? if it is, it is possible to craft a selector to match only a specific type of listing.

yes, you should.

this is because distill only looks at the full text and not the individual items in the list for comparison. the listing for the new “rareitem 333” will be at the top making that text different from all previous text recorded in the change history.

thanks for sharing your use case! :slight_smile:

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