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

20 points aljgz | 1 comments | 16 Oct 25 17:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | 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. slightwinder ◴[17 Oct 25 11:34 UTC] No.45615495[source]▶
The solution are text-files, automation and version-control. Write scripts which are regularly automatically export all data, configs, communication, etc. into a centralized storage which is under version control with an automatic commit every day, which is also exported into a report of that day's changes. Then use grep or whatever to search it.

People will not maintain knowledge bases unless you force them. So remove as much friction as possible and make as accessible as possible. Hence, the automation and textiles. It doesn't need to be plaintext, just something universal and human-readable. Could be formatted in markdown, yaml, json, be single email-files, everything you can find with simple tools and make connections with. The version-control and it's report then will allow you to follow the trail of work, to discover what was discussed and change around the same time, to find connections. And it's never wrong to have a reversible history of your stuff.

And maybe along the way you can motivate people to also write some proper documentation here and there, and add some more fancy tools on-top.