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

For the past couple of months I have been entertaining the idea of starting my personal knowledge base. However, while this idea appeals to me as a person who likes to document stuff, I fail to see any purpose in having a knowledge base when any information lies within a google search. So my question is, why have it?

I've been thinking for a while that a (sort of) mix of the two would be worthwhile.

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).

> I've been thinking for a while that a (sort of) mix of the two would be worthwhile.

Perhaps, that is a better way to go about it but that just becomes a glorified notes app.

I really struggle with the sort of obsessive compulsive behaviour that makes curating a personal knowledge base a meaningful and useful exercise. Nevertheless I did it for years using a Mac OS only suite of apps from DevonThink. Then my ancient MacPro died and I switched to Linux.

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.

>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.