Ask HN: 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.

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).

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

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