How to deduplicate job listings aggregated across multiple boards

When aggregating job listings from multiple boards, the same posting often appears several times with slight variations in title, company name, or location format, creating a deduplication challenge. Exact-string matching fails to catch these near-identical duplicates, while fuzzy similarity matching risks incorrectly merging genuinely different roles, such as positions in different cities or at different seniority levels. A more reliable approach involves normalizing each key field — stripping punctuation, standardizing case — and then requiring a composite match across title, company, and location together. When duplicates are confirmed, the recommended method is to merge records rather than discard them, preserving unique fields such as salary, description, and posted date from each source. Tracking how many raw postings collapse into merged records also serves as a useful quality-control signal for the aggregation pipeline.