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by sethammons 1736 days ago
As for an ok way to manage internal knowledge, I've yet to see it. I've wanted to try out the Johnny Decimal System because if you can create a solid hierarchy of a filing system, everyone should be able to drill down to the right doc. Confluence search doesn't work. Neither does google docs. I think I now want the ability to just pull a local copy of a section of docs, say "all engineering," and just use grep locally.
1 comments

What are your issues with Google Docs search? Just curious as I'm building a product to generate a better wiki out of Docs/Drive.
I tried to replicate an exact issue I had last week, but I can't which is interesting. I knew I had read a doc days earlier. I could not find it by partial title matches, content searches, nothing. I had to search email for "so and so shared a doc" to get back to the document. Of course, now I can find it the expected way. I routinely need to search things that are buried in docs, like our intern program. This was another one where I couldn't quite remember the title of the doc nor who wrote it. I searched and searched variations of things containing "intern" and even though I had been in the document within the last couple of weeks, I just plum couldn't find it. I had to go back to a calendar invite to find the doc. Part of the problem could be that sometimes people write things different. I might look for "precap," a part of a doc title I'd expect for interviews, but someone else stored it as "interview pre-read" and so I can't find it. That's why I like document hierarchies / trees for finding things. I can go HR -> interviewing -> $something_more_if_needed and browse a couple of files and find what I want. Labels are cool for when something fits into multiple locations in the tree.
Great insight, thanks!
Got one more that showed up yesterday. A doc was shared via link, but I didn't see where the link went so I searched for it by title (looking at the shared screen during a meeting). No results in google docs. Found the link, and the doc opened right up. It was shared and I wouldn't be able to find it.