Jquery :: Selecting The First Element In A List Only Once

I have an autocompleter in which i am trying to grab the text in the first element in a list of returned results from the db. I have been able to grab the first element in the list with the below code however, it brings up an alert for every realtime list that comes back so multiple times. Is there a clever way to make an if/else statement that forces it to alert only once?

var item = $('.title_div:first').text();
alert('this item ' + item + ' is the first to be showed');