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I need a web app that can automatically check a given web page everyday for given text, and if it detects the text inside the page, send me an email. I am not asking for a service monitoring the changes but monitoring a page for the desired text. The page can change everyday, every hour, but that word does not always appear.

Is there such a web service?

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  • You could try ifttt
    – Alex
    Sep 20, 2011 at 12:38
  • @Alex: I heard about it but do you know if it can do that for sure? Sep 20, 2011 at 12:49
  • To be honest, no. That's why I haven't post it as an answer. But you are looking for a custom set of actions and that's exactly the purpose of ifttt - to allow you to build custom triggers - so I think you should give it a try.
    – Alex
    Sep 20, 2011 at 12:57
  • 3
    I signed up and checked but it only has predefined Channels (popular web services like Facebook, Gmail, Weather Channel, etc.) that provide triggers. So it won't work for any given web page. Sep 20, 2011 at 13:15
  • the closest trigger in ifttt apply to a rss feed, not a random page: "This trigger fires every time a new item in the feed you specify contains a particular keyword or simple phrase."
    – kraymer
    Sep 20, 2011 at 13:16

4 Answers 4

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curl -s http://webapps.stackexchange.com/ | grep twitter &&
mail -s "website references twitter" [email protected]  </dev/null

This will send an email to [email protected] when "twitter" appears anywhere on webapps.stackexchange.com site.

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  • Can I use the above code on Windows 7? If yes, how? Sep 27, 2011 at 14:35
  • 1
    No. Not unless you download cygwin.
    – sente
    Oct 6, 2011 at 21:01
6

Using http://www.watchthatpage.com create a channel, add the URL(s) of the page(s) to monitor and then enable keyword matching via Edit Properties.

2

I use ChangeDetection.com. It is free, but only has daily mails, so no real-time monitoring. Other than that, it has been working really well for several years.

0

I use Montastic.

its nice, because you can setup a url and also a presence or absence of a keyword.

there you can monitor with the free plan up to 3 active URLs every 30 minutes (unlimited inactive URLs).

with paid plans you can monitor every 5 minutes and you can increase the active URLs for monitoring.

and there is also an API and an iPhone App to manage the settings.

Homepage with detailed feature list: http://www.montastic.com

Disclaimer: i am a user of this service at free plan

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  • 1
    The link you listed doesn't list the keyword feature you mentioned here. Is there a better link? Also, can you add a disclaimer regarding any link you have to montastic? Examples: Owner, employee, investor, user, etc. Dec 26, 2012 at 20:19
  • 1
    its here: "What are the features? [...] NEW! Verify presence or absence of keyword on a web page' - also you see it in the video
    – muescha
    Dec 26, 2012 at 22:06
  • PS: added disclaimer
    – muescha
    Dec 26, 2012 at 22:08

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