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Watcher Docs

Choosing sources

The default recipe: two sources

Section titled “The default recipe: two sources”

For anything that matters, use an authority plus a finder:

sources:
  # 1. The authority — where the news is official when it lands
  - type: page
    value: "https://example.gov/notifications"
    trust: official


  # 2. The finder — catches it wherever it is published first
  - type: search
    value: "2026 examination result declared"
    hints:
      recencyDays: 21
      topic: news

Why both:

  • The authority can confirm an alert; an ungraded news site cannot.
  • The finder covers you when the portal is slow, down, or unreadable.
  • Two sources reporting the same event also satisfy minSources: 2 if you want corroboration before a confirmed alert.

By kind of watch

Section titled “By kind of watch”
You are watching Sources
A project’s releases rss on the official feed (trust: official), plus a search for coverage
A government or institutional notice board page on the notice list, plus a pinned search
A product’s availability or price page on the product URL. Add hints: { reader: true } if the page is JavaScript-driven
A topic with no obvious home search only, pinned as tightly as you can
A person or organisation’s announcements rss if they have a feed, otherwise search with topic: news
Section titled “Tuning search”
- type: search
  value: "2026 examination result"
  hints:
    officialDomains: ["example.gov", "example.nic.in"]
    recencyDays: 30
    searchDepth: advanced

Restricts results to those domains and treats them as official, so this source can produce confirmed alerts.

Tuning pages

Section titled “Tuning pages”
- type: page
  value: "https://example.gov/notices"
  hints:
    reader: true      # render JavaScript-heavy pages
    legacyTls: true   # only for old portals with outdated TLS

Enable reader when the collection stats show pages being fetched but yielding little text. Enable legacyTls only in response to an SSL error — it lowers the connection’s security for that source.

Tuning feeds

Section titled “Tuning feeds”
- type: rss
  value: "https://example.com/feed.xml"
  hints: { followLink: true }

Use followLink when the feed publishes one-line summaries: Watcher then fetches each linked article and runs it through the full page-extraction ladder.

How many sources?

Section titled “How many sources?”

Two or three. More sources mean more content to evaluate, which costs quota and increases the chance of an off-topic match. If you find yourself adding a fifth, consider whether it is really two watches.

Trust matters as much as coverage

Section titled “Trust matters as much as coverage”

A watch with three ungraded sources can never produce a confirmed alert — every hit is capped at the weak tier. Either point one source at an authority, or add trust rules for the domains you rely on. See Source trust and Manage the trust registry.

When a source keeps failing

Section titled “When a source keeps failing”

A source that errors is skipped and the watch continues with the others; only a total failure ends the run. Persistent failures show up in the run record’s source errors — see Sources return nothing.