Find, Group & Sort Similar Records

[Darci]

Greetings mighty Airtable community,

We are trying to set up a very simple automation called "FIND SIMILAR RECORDS" within our blog article base (hundreds maybe thousands of records/titles/articles) that would look like the example below. When a new record is created, we'd like to automatically Find and Group (and Sort) similar records in order to look for redundancy or duplicates. Meaning:

• Every time someone goes to "create a new record"
• When "specific service" field is [current item] entered into the new record
• And/Or "keyword" is [current item] entered into the new record
• Automatically Find and Group similar records in order to look for redundancy or duplicates

We'd like this to be an automation rather than to set it up as a simple search option.

It seems like a simple request but the free version will not play nice. When we asked Airtable support if the app will do this, they said they cannot help with automation setup. For example, we're not sure:

-- if this would be a script to run, or if there are better automation options in the paid version -- we hope so anyway.

-- We are also not sure if [current item] would work in an automation. Meaning when a user goes to "create a new record", the "specific service" field is a dropdown list and can be any of 10 items. The "keyword" field is a text field allowing any text to be entered. Most importantly, we are asking the automation to "find similar records" based on the [current item] -- which is what the user enters when creating the new record. Is this doable with airtable?

Just to reiterate, this is a "find similar records" automation -- but we're having a devil of a time trying to get the automation to work (with the free version). So thought we should reach out to the community before jumping in on a paid version to see if it will work with AirTable, or moving along to another solution.

thank you for any and all suggestions, Darci

[Alexey_Gusev]

Hi,
I think it's doable by automation.
You can't make it work with 'When a record created' for manual user input, because when you create a new record, it is empty. You should put other trigger, and usually it is something to be filled or updated AFTER mentioned 2 fields.

If you set trigger to a condition 'specific service' not empty AND 'keyword' not empty, it will run exactly after user chose option from drop-down list and enter the first letter of a keyword. This is not you want. 
But if you change fields order, user can enter keyword at first, then select from drop-down list, in such way automation can work as expected, with both fields completely filled.
You can also add checkbox and set trigger to run when fields are not empty and checkbox is checked.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hmm, "Specific service" is a select field and so you're looking at doing an exact match for that one, is that right?

For the "Focus Keyword" bit I see that you've got a ";" divider there.  I take it that means that, if "The Anatomy of a Roof" was the post in question, you'd want it to find posts with either of the keyword groups "Roof defined" and "Roof parts"?

[Darci]

Yes you're on the right track, thank you -- it's just a matter of grouping and sorting the blog article topics together:

1. The field SPECIFIC SERVICE is a dropdown select of about a dozen services the roofer offers -- yes, it would be an exact match.

2. Focus Keyword can be anything the SEO strategist deems "findable" in order to keep the blog posts GROUPED together -- and look for DUPLICATES -- or similarities -- between posts because we blog away on specific topics, parts of topics, general topics, you name it, nothing stops us from explaining anything and everything! (Let's face it, SEO is all about domain authority).

IN CASE THIS HELPS: For example, what got us interested in Airtable in the first place was we saw this screenshot (attached) in an FAQ post and asked how it was set up, but support declined to answer:

"If Category is [Current Item in dropdown], OR "Focus Keyword" includes [something similar], then...

Thanks for any and all suggestions! Darci

[Darci]

Yes we DO want the action to run exactly after the user chooses the option from the drop-down list and entering the keyword! This would work well as we create blog articles that are very similar to each other all the time.

Thanks for all the suggestions, sorry to say it but we are newbies here -- can you give us an idea of how to:

1.  set trigger to a condition 'specific service' not empty AND 'keyword' not empty.

2. change fields order, user can enter keyword at first, then select from drop-down list, in such way automation can work as expected, with both fields completely filled.

3. We know how a checkbox and set trigger work, but any examples are most welcome.

Thanks again, Darci

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Thanks for the details!  The dropdown select will be really straightforward and that's what's in your screenshot as well.  To do that, you'd use conditional groups: https://support.airtable.com/docs/conditional-groups-of-automation-actions

Link to base 

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The Focus Keywords bit is the tricky one.  Assuming an exact match on multiple values where you're using the ";" as a divider (i.e. For "The Anatomy of a Roof", you'd want it to find posts with either of the keyword groups "Roof defined" and "Roof parts"), then you could potentially do this with an additional multiple select field and an automation that'll convert the text to multiple select options and then do the search there

If you want similar matches on multiple values, e.g. for the keyword group "Roof defined" you want any posts with the keywords "Roof" or "Defined" to show up, that's also possible but would need to be set up differently.  The results of this search would probably be pretty broad though and I don't know how useful that'd be

The meaning of "similar" is pretty broad here, and so if you could provide some examples of posts and how you'd expect them to be found (e.g. this is a duplicate, this is a similarity) and how that logic works that'd be most helpful!

[Alexey_Gusev]

Hi,
It's quite easy
1. 

2. Just click and drag field. 
Tip: when you have many fields (20 or more) you can avoid scrolling left/right but use Hide fields menu instead. Just click anchor at the right (3x2 dots) and drag to reorder.
The same works when you need to reorder tables in a base.

[Darci]

Thanks Adam,

Working with the conditional logic is much more difficult than originally thought!

I read carefully thru your reply and might be close to a solution, but who knows? Can you help me understand why when setting up the "Sort" logic, the "Select input list" choices are all grayed out? That's as far as we can go at this time. 

[TheTimeSavingCo]

You'll need to use a "Find Record" step before the "Sort" step.  The "Sort" step uses the result of the "Find Record" step, does that make sense?

[Darci]

Yes thanks kindly, it makes sense! Wish Airtable would include that kind of information (must use Find logic prior to Sort). 

We've created 2 automations that test out nicely -- but nothing happens when we're in the Base and after adding a new record. So...dumbest question of all, but shouldn't the Automation run on the Base itself? Again, we see that the Automation runs in the test -- but not in the Base 😛