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Ask HN: Best way to create a searchable knowledge base?

20 points aljgz | 5 comments | 16 Oct 25 17:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.426s | source

Have you had the experience of using/developing knowledge bases? Here is my scenario:

My team is dealing with a lot of information: Wikis, Code repos, Monitoring dashboards, internal chat messages, emails, Task tickets, related systems, etc.

There are many cases when we need to do ad-hoc searches for anything related to a concept. For instance, imagine if someone makes a change to a metric, there is a need to find all dashboards that might be using this metric to make sure they are still valid after the change.

I don't want to just fix this problem, but create the ability to find related information in ad-hoc cases.

The ramp-up time is not important, as long as some positive value can be created with a small initial effort.

Any existing products (Paid/Free/Open Source, etc) and any references to existing knowledge (designs, discussions) about this would be really appreciated.

1. softwaredoug ◴[16 Oct 25 18:23 UTC] No.45608894[source]▶
I've _never_ seen a wiki or internal documentation stay up to date.

My experience has been to encourage public blogging / speaking of technical information. If its public, there are several benefits. First you need to explain to people with little context from the company. You also feel scrutiny to make it accurate and not embarrass yourself. And readers will see the date of authorship, and have a sense of when this information was true. And of course, Google is a better search engine than anything you'll have internally!

For example, when I worked on search at Reddit, I didn't point people at anything internal (that stuff rots) but instead I would point people at places like:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditEng/comments/1985mnj/bringing...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUtF1gyHsSM

The downside to this approach is companies are too precious about IP so don't want you to be specific. (despite it almost certaintly not being special). Also company blogs can get over-edited to the point where they lose authenticity in favor of SEO spam.

This isn't the tool to use for things like runbooks, etc. It's a more useful thing for broader context.

I wish more companies just gave their developers their own personal blogs, and were less precious about preventing speaking.

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2. aljgz ◴[16 Oct 25 18:36 UTC] No.45609035[source]▶
This is a very interesting take. At this moment, I have little hope that I can encourage others to do this in the short term, but a helpful reminder for myself to finish and post some of the drafts I've kept for too long.
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3. softwaredoug ◴[16 Oct 25 18:38 UTC] No.45609068[source]▶
At Reddit, I tried to be the instigator for other people to do this :) It helps to have someone encouraging blogging, speaking. Almost a team evangelist.
4. uaas ◴[17 Oct 25 10:49 UTC] No.45615180[source]▶
Public speaking is great, but not sure if it’s easier to keep a recorded talk (or even a company blog post) up to date than anything else you have full control over.
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5. softwaredoug ◴[17 Oct 25 12:24 UTC] No.45615946[source]▶
I think the "keeping up to date" is a fools errand IMO. Because you end up with "half-up-to-date" documentation where someone thought to update some part of it, but not another. And it gets incoherent.

So my preference is a coherent story at a point in time