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Comment by souterrain | Hacker News Reader

I find that an ability to search the knowledgebase exceeds the value of organizing according to a hierarchy. I can see some value in linking/backlinking à la an encyclopedic "See also" reference for discovering similar information that doesn't share keywords.

Are there other disadvantages to an "all search" solution I'm overlooking?

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Think it tends to be mostly a personal preference thing.

I use both, but do rather like hierarchies - they just seem like a natural way of grokking things. I also tend to just naturally outline a lot, whether writing, taking notes or coding.

Another reason I find them useful is that the act of organizing them is also a form of learning for me - not just the information, but the context and relations.

A third reason I like hierarchies is probably a result of a mental flaw. I've always had an issue with "missing words" - where a particular noun just doesn't come to me when I need it. Definitely worse with proper names for some reason. When I'm missing a word, context works much better for finding something.

I also do both right now, helps with some rediscovery, but I think tagging (linking) could be a better long term approach.

It depends on what you are looking for. Your thinking works at least in a different way. You remember things by finding things that connect to the thing your looking for...

One could say their "Link map" enables such a thing but its not quite the same thing.

Personally I do really like the Zettelkasten Method which leans more towards a representation of thought in a written form. Ever wondered how the Zettelkasten "guy" Nikolas Luhman could be so productive(> 50 books) it was because of his Zettelkasten(Method).

http://www.dansheffler.com/blog/2015-05-05-the-zettelkasten-...

So every time I find a new tool, at least for me I evaluate it through that lens: how much does it really help me to represent my thought process. And hiearchical notes are not enough for that, at least for me...

The disadvantage of an "all search" solution is that it presumes that you know what you are looking for. Some of the greatest value I get from my notes happens when I'm serendipitously browsing an old hierarchy, remembering connections I made before.

All search plus some form of spaced memorization scheme for pages or blocks within pages would be nice, I wouldn't have to actively structure my notes that way. I hate structure, I'm always refactoring, so I prefer just saving things in one big folder with labels if I can. I wish I didn't even have to use folders in my file system!

tiddlywiki has an anki plugin

When all you have is search, you may run into the difficulty of actively organizing and structuring notes and clippings into a hierarchy, clusters, or mind map. Also the search support varies from "exact match" to "fuzzy match" to "synonym search".

For example, Evernote supports Notebooks but they only create one level of hierarchy. Often the use of "tags" is then recommended to label notes with context, hierarchy, and categories.

We went for search with Emvi [1]. There are people who like hierarchy, but I think if you don't know what you're looking for you won't find it in a structure anyway. Except everyone on the team or you personally put a lot of thought into it. A hierarchy does not scale well. We tried to make the search as powerful as possible. With filters that can be combined to filter the result set, but I mostly use the textsearch as it is good enough.

Im still thinking about how we could add "explorability". Sometimes you just want to click around a bit and explore what's there without any real goal in mind. Let me know if you have an idea on how the system could support that.

We are rebuilding the UI right now to put an even stronger focus on search. You can read about it here [2] if you like.

[1] https://emvi.com/

[2] https://emvi.com/blog/a-new-experimental-user-interface-QMZg...

> A hierarchy does not scale well. We tried to make the search as powerful as possible. With filters that can be combined to filter the result set, but I mostly use the textsearch as it is good enough.

Does it support dynamic hierachies? A Hierachy where each level is the result of a search/filter on the parent-level?

Hm I haven't heard of this term before but it sounds like it. The filters are additive, which means you reduce the result further by adding more filters. You can for example filter for a tag, add a group to filter for authors and then search through the remaining articles by text search.

I haven't found this feature to be that useful all the time, depending on the amount of articles you have. This is why it won't be in the new UI on day one (but will be re-implemented later, the backend is still there). You can find almost anything by using a few keywords, which is how I navigate Emvi right now.

[Edit] We have the plan to add configurable dashboard filters, which use the filters to show a subset of all articles, tags, members, groups and lists you like. I guess that's closer to what you described.

Ha they even have zettekasten material in their demo Video. Although the tool nothing looks not much helping with it nor mentioning it in the text...

Well it's not primarily build to be a Zettelkasten. But you can use it like a Zettelkasten if you really want to, like with most writing tools. We have a few users which do that already. I wrote about it here: https://emvi.com/blog/luhmanns-zettelkasten-a-productivity-t...

I agree 100%. Don't see why one approach must preclude the other.

I prefer using tags rather than folders, so I actually keep every e-mail since last year's January 1st in my Outlook inbox (currently at 29,348 and counting...) and just search. If you let Outlook index everything, it's blazing fast, and you can sort by name / subject / date / category pretty easily to further drill down results and find what you want.

Haven't found a system that works better, with the only disadvantage being that searching on mobile really sucks

I agree 100%. It's shocking how many knowledge base apps there are with terrible search. What's the point of putting stuff in if you can't find it when you need it? I've been working on https://histre.com/ (Effortless Knowledge Base) and search is the #1 thing I'm focusing on now.

This was my experience with my photo collection. I pretty much abandoned Lightroom because Google lets me type "pug" in the search box and find all of my pug pictures.

It also holds my pictures and their metadata hostage but that's another story.

> I find that an ability to search the knowledgebase exceeds the value of organizing according to a hierarchy.

Why not both? Searching is good for makro-managment, navigation and dynamic. Hierachy works well for micro-managment, relations and static access.

My "all search" solution is a text file. Works great.

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