# Percolator usage confusion
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/percolator-usage-confusion/5846
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [November 11, 2011, 5:22pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/percolator-usage-confusion/5846 "2011-11-11T17:22:42Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Mauricio\_Alarcon](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Mauricio_Alarcon)
#### Post date: [November 11, 2011, 5:22pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/percolator-usage-confusion/5846/1 "2011-11-11T17:22:42Z")
I'm a bit confused about the use of percolator, I've got a use case
that I think it might apply, but after playing with it for a while I
can't figure out if that's the best match. I was wondering if someone
can give me insights about this
I'm planning to use as part of an "alerts" system we need to
implement, thus, if a new "document" matching the user query is
inserted, then we'll proceed to email the user with the latest
results.
For the sake of simplification, let's say I've got a index with
"books" as documents (title, author, print date, isbn, etc), then
users register for an alert, e.g. "author = John Doe,
since=2011-11-10".
During the day a lot of new books are inserted in the index. Can I use
the percolator to know out of the new inserted books which one needs
to be send as alerts?
Reading the documentation seems that I need to apply the percolator
function to each inserted document. Is there a way to use percolator
as a means to get me all the queries we need to run to alert the
users?
Thanks
~M
---
### Author:  [@kimchy](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/kimchy)
#### Post date: [November 13, 2011, 8:46am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/percolator-usage-confusion/5846/2 "2011-11-13T08:46:34Z")
Percolate will return matching queries when you index a document. You can
potentially simply implement the alerts by executing scheduled queries if
it fits your use case better.
On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 7:22 PM, maverick [mauricio.alarcon@gmail.com](mailto:mauricio.alarcon@gmail.com)wrote:
> I'm a bit confused about the use of percolator, I've got a use case
> that I think it might apply, but after playing with it for a while I
> can't figure out if that's the best match. I was wondering if someone
> can give me insights about this
>
> I'm planning to use as part of an "alerts" system we need to
> implement, thus, if a new "document" matching the user query is
> inserted, then we'll proceed to email the user with the latest
> results.
>
> For the sake of simplification, let's say I've got a index with
> "books" as documents (title, author, print date, isbn, etc), then
> users register for an alert, e.g. "author = John Doe,
> since=2011-11-10".
>
> During the day a lot of new books are inserted in the index. Can I use
> the percolator to know out of the new inserted books which one needs
> to be send as alerts?
>
> Reading the documentation seems that I need to apply the percolator
> function to each inserted document. Is there a way to use percolator
> as a means to get me all the queries we need to run to alert the
> users?
>
> Thanks
>
> ~M
---
### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2017, 3:48am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/percolator-usage-confusion/5846/3 "2017-07-06T03:48:53Z")