Ask HN: Why have a knowledge base when anything is easily googleable?

1. The answers from google aren't always correct and/or up to date.

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

Many things are not easily googleable.

- 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

In all sincerity it looks like an amazing feature to have. I'm glad someone is providing this to the world, it's much needed for today's browsers.

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.

Currently, I am trying out obsidian[1]. So far, I really like it. To be completely honest, it's one of the reasons I want to start a knowledge base.

[1]. https://obsidian.md

I keep a work-log, every day I have a template which gets created via a macro:

     * 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

I record commands, stories, meetings, and other things. These are very very very useful to me for reference purposes, and absolutely not the kind of thing you can search google for.

Having your own notes/knowledge-base/wiki is good because it is stuff YOU care about, not stuff other people have posted.