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

20 points aljgz | 2 comments | 16 Oct 25 17:36 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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.

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rurban ◴[16 Oct 25 19:52 UTC] No.45609934[source]▶
I did that for a very large multi-continent automotive company. There were several unsuccessful attempts before. I did it with my own phpwiki, plus xapian integration for searching over all the other existing documentation and tickets, SAP and CQ. It's still doing good for the last 15 years.

It's markdown, with several plug-ins. Easier than mediawiki which relies on human forces. We preferred automation, but no insanities like on other wikis like WYSIWYG editing and such management nonsense.

replies(1): >>45610085 #
1. aljgz ◴[16 Oct 25 20:08 UTC] No.45610085[source]▶
This is very interesting. If it's convenient, can you please share a few reasons why previous attempts failed?
replies(1): >>45612211 #
2. rurban ◴[17 Oct 25 00:24 UTC] No.45612211[source]▶
They tried the usual wikis, like mediawiki, confluence,... But had no search integration of their other documentation.

And I had the advantage of being the phpwiki maintainer those times to easily extend it to our needs. And I wrote some custom plugins for them, with ajax tricks. It helped that phpwiki is not such a mess as mediawiki, which was also entirely insecure.

All these plugins were up streamed then. Then Alcatel took over maintainance and they run a similar knowledge base.