Ask HN: Why have a knowledge base when anything is easily googleable? 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? |
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
- 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
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.
* 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
Having your own notes/knowledge-base/wiki is good because it is stuff YOU care about, not stuff other people have posted.
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).
Perhaps, that is a better way to go about it but that just becomes a glorified notes app.
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
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.
Thanks for giving Histre a try.
I have other KBs but yeah I agreed that I do not go back very often, maybe just in training sessions.
2. Google can't help you if you don't know that something exists in the first place.
[1]. https://obsidian.md
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.
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/