Ask HN: Why have a knowledge base when anything is easily googleable?

[moonfleet]

For the past couple of months I have been entertaining the idea of starting my personal knowledge base. However, while this idea appeals to me as a person who likes to document stuff, I fail to see any purpose in having a knowledge base when any information lies within a google search. So my question is, why have it?

[byko3y]

>Why have a knowledge base when anything is easily googleable?

Because it isn't. It's not even close to "anything". Only superficial things are googlable, and even then google's NN algorithms sometimes manage to mess thing up, providing some useless links instead of a single correct one. That's why I tend to use google for quick search, but then I back it up with my own notes and articles/books/webpage archive. Of course, most of the times I will never use the things I store, but once in a while it saves me days. Knowing that I don't save regular stuff every kid can find in a minute even if the original resource is gone.

[moonfleet]

I'll give you an example to make my point clearer.

For the past month I have been reading Sylvia Plath's biography and works. I decided to document what I had learnt about her. I created a sort-of wiki page of her in my personal notes app. But then I went to the actual page and found the same information there.

This made me think that I needed to change my approach and I came here to ask this.

[byko3y]

>I created a sort-of wiki page of her in my personal notes app. But then I went to the actual page and found the same information there

Usually when I read wiki written by more than one man and need something more complex than "born xxxx, died xxxx", I feel like the page was written by schizophrenic with OCD i.e. the information is not consistent and writer is obsessed by formal correctness at the expense of clarity. Thus I cannot understand shit unless I'm already well familiar with the topic - but then what's the reason for me to read this article?

[gt2]

I do similar things (and have came upon similar notes elsewhere) but my personal notes are still valuable because a) they are structured how I think, and b) I remember it better/it finds its way into my consciousness better by writing it.

[AtomicOrbital]

I maintain a set of text files some of which I refer to many times hourly to either read or write to

here are the more frequently used text files

- work specific - software specific - general todo with daily entries - general purpose knowledge - vacation related with top tips per country - nyc specific

within some of these files are top level categories with subentries

I have search tooling to probe the files ... sometime as simple as

cat file | egrep --color=auto -B20 -A20 'some string'

which will color highlight matches and show surrounding lines from the file

I find note keeping a critical skill everyone should adopt to varying extents ... my main software note file contains over 90,000 lines of text so is the keystone to my approach ( yes that's over 1600 pages ) ... as the complexity of my note keeping expanded so did my ability to organically do local searches so I am not in want of any outside tools ... all I use is vi and various flavors of grep

additionally I have a few directories with subdirs which are either project or topic or tool specific

having organizational skills when working on complex research projects which span months or years pays back in spades and note keeping is just one aspect

[epc]

Stuff disappears from the web, from Google's index. Jurisdictions issue diktats that information be removed.

I used to rely on tags on bookmarks to find things, only to discover that the pages I’d bookmarked had disappeared (bit rot, corporate pivot, corporate failure, death of the blogger, etc).

I now save pages I find useful to Evernote. It's not ideal, but at least it's indexed by Evernote (and some images are OCRd so any text in the images also ends up in the search index). I download PDFs and other non-HTML resources. I assume Evernote will disappear some day so I back up my notebooks regularly.

I’ve been online in some format or another since 1987, the only certainty is that the thing I distinctly remember reading a couple of years ago will either disappear from Google’s index (Altavista, Veronica, Archie, etc) or will be removed (think of all of the blogs that used to live at typepad.com or vox.com or LiveJournals).

If it's valuable to you…save it.

[sharmi]

One more reason: There are so many sites writing on so many subjects but most of them are skewed for the Google algorithm.

Finding meaningful content that adds value is very rare. There is no guarantee you will get the same page next time you search, unless you can recollect a significant unique string from the page.

Hence, a knowledge base.

[detaro]

Many things are not easily googleable.

- things you figured out yourself

- private or proprietary information

- things that are only in books

- things that are online, but as a side-note page 1735 of a large PDF somewhere, not next to what you'd think would be relevant keywords

- things that are online, but on obscure, hard-to-find websites

- things that were online, but the sites have gone by now

[Quequau]

I really struggle with the sort of obsessive compulsive behaviour that makes curating a personal knowledge base a meaningful and useful exercise. Nevertheless I did it for years using a Mac OS only suite of apps from DevonThink. Then my ancient MacPro died and I switched to Linux.

I kept the data because I kept thinking I would go back to it and do a better job curating it... but I just haven't done it.

Meanwhile the web dev in my circle of friends set up a bare instance of discourse on some cloud VPS somewhere (it was intended to be an escape from Facebook) and it's turned out to be great. I use it for a common place book and while the search isn't all that, it's good enough for me find older thoughts that I've had easily enough to habitually add to them as I come across new things that are related.

[stevekemp]

I keep a work-log, every day I have a template which gets created via a macro:

     * DD/MM/YYYY
     ** Desktop Setup
     None.
     ** Meetings
     None.
     ** Tickets / Stories / Projects
     ** Problems
     None.
     ** Worked Hours
     #+NAME: hours-DD-MM-YYYY
     | Start |   End | Total Hours |
     |-------+-------+-------------|
     | 09:00 | 09:00 |         0.0 |
     #+TBLFM: $3=$2-$1;t%.1f
     ** END

I record commands, stories, meetings, and other things. These are very very very useful to me for reference purposes, and absolutely not the kind of thing you can search google for.

Having your own notes/knowledge-base/wiki is good because it is stuff YOU care about, not stuff other people have posted.

[astro-codes]

I've been thinking for a while that a (sort of) mix of the two would be worthwhile.

1. Personal knowledge bases seem to be high friction (have to manually add information and requires consistency).

2. Google is leaky, you search for something, open a bunch of tabs, and then probably just close them all. What happens when you need that info again?

I was thinking that a dashboard built on top of Google search would be helpful. Something that keeps a note of what content is related to the search I made, and keeps a record / makes it easy to retrieve again later.

(Yes I know the manual effort involved in documenting what you learn is beneficial).

[moonfleet]

> I've been thinking for a while that a (sort of) mix of the two would be worthwhile.

Perhaps, that is a better way to go about it but that just becomes a glorified notes app.

[kirubakaran]

I've talked to a lot of users of https://histre.com/ and I've asked this question. Here are some reasons they gave:

1. It is great to retain the research path along with the knowledge.

2. When you research something on the web, you narrow down your list and then you act on it. It is very helpful to keep this list and be able to branch off from there.

3. Collaboration becomes much easier

[rckoepke]

Wow, that site (histre) made me sign up and verify email before telling me the pricing structure or that there's no perpetual free plan. That seems like a terribly unfriendly UX.

Edit: After signing up there's no 'delete account' button/option/function.

Edit 2: Apparently histre really is your product. How do you recommend me to delete my account? There's no 'contact' , 'help', etc pages that I can find. Truly no method is provided to delete accounts or contact anyone.

[kirubakaran]

Thanks for the feedback. I'll make it more obvious. I've deleted it for you and replied to your email as well.

Thanks for giving Histre a try.

[rckoepke]

In all sincerity it looks like an amazing feature to have. I'm glad someone is providing this to the world, it's much needed for today's browsers.

I'm not personally in a position to try this out currently as the product I'm currently employed to work on with >$50MM quarterly revenue just got axed due to macro effects of coronavirus. I know you have a free 30-day trial but I'm not sure I want to invest the energy to learn a new 'flow' that I know I won't be using next month.

My earlier frustration was mainly because I'm heavily fatigued with the appearances of dark patterns in modern business products, particularly SaaS, but by no means limited to web or tech in general. I've had some negative experiences recently when trying to cancel services and it colors my perceptions when I'm evaluating new offerings. I have learned the hard way to be diligent not just in cancelling subscriptions, but also to fully delete payment methods in order to prevent accidental/fraudulent continuations of charges. Critically I've found it necessary to also try my best to delete my entire account as some companies have followed up with mistaken debt collection calls/letters for my accounts months after I've made recorded phone calls to cancel and removed my payment methods online. For me it's now difficult to trust companies with auto-renew contracts, as the value of my time spent fixing the 5% of cancellations I have issues with dwarf the total dollars spent on all services/memberships in the first place. It sometimes takes months of back and forth to get these debt collection processes cleared up.

I do have a lot of empathy for launching good products in today's increasingly difficult environment of new regulatory burdens, walled gardens that are hard to interact with, and juggernaut monopoly products that make it hard to provide alternatives to users. I wish you well and hope you continue to evolve the utility of bookmarks and browsing history for end users. There's a lot of value to create there.

[kirubakaran]

I understand. Thanks for the detailed response. I will make things more obvious. There is no intention to make cancellation hard. Just a solo founder working hard to get all the pieces in place.

I'm going with $3/month as the lowest plan (instead of free) because this product is server resource intensive. I decided against VC funding as the funded companies in this space are just adtech companies in disguise.

I'll be happy to have you as a free user though. I'll send you an email with details.

Thank you for the kind words. Here is the latest feature I've shipped: https://histre.com/features/highlights/

[markus_zhang]

If you can find a way to make KB organized then for sure it's better than simple Googling. Plus in many occurences I have to pull contents from quite a few webpages and put them under the same problem.

[moonfleet]

Do you actually go back to your KB to look something up? I feel like having a KB is merely a way of reinforcing retention of new information.

[markus_zhang]

Yeah I do, for example I constantly look up how to do percentiles in Vertica. Man I can never memorize these, so I have a KB of queries and imported most of them into Datagrip using live templates starting with '_' followed by name of database. Some of them are technical stuffs and some of them are business stuffs (like how to get this piece of info from the tables).

I have other KBs but yeah I agreed that I do not go back very often, maybe just in training sessions.

[codingdave]

1. The answers from google aren't always correct and/or up to date.

2. Google can't help you if you don't know that something exists in the first place.

[Someone]

Only common knowledge can be found on the net. You won’t find institutional knowledge or ‘old’ stuff.

[mraza007]

Just curious what tools do you use to keep a knowledge base

[moonfleet]

Currently, I am trying out obsidian[1]. So far, I really like it. To be completely honest, it's one of the reasons I want to start a knowledge base.

[1]. https://obsidian.md

[meiraleal]

with so much knowledge, you need an index. And a large index is a knowledge base. Why not?