Show HN: Manuzoid – Database of More Than 1M Manuals | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Manuzoid – Database of More Than 1M Manuals

manuzoid.com

234 pointsbitgur29 comments

Suggestion: allow a list as an alternative to (or maybe even instead of) a gallery.

Too many titles start with the same text, and the gallery doesn't allow the user to see the full title except with a (slow or non-existent, depending on the platform) mouseover.

Update: I see that the dedicated brand pages are more useful than general search results, but it's very hard to navigate the list of brands (although obviously you can go directly to a brand by typing your own URL).

Is there anything more satisfying than reviving some random old appliance with a pdf service manual found on the internet?

The best. With very little electronic I revived some vintage stereo equipment using the original circuit board schematic diagram. I had a lot of help from YouTube and online forums, but the level of detail in the service manuals is incredible.

Like any other comment, I will ask the same. How did you get 1 million manuals? Show HN is for small projects usually. Can you tell us or tell us a range you paid for the 1 million manuals?

I would guess scraping other sites and trying to do a credible job of cleaning up mis-labeled files, fixing meta-data, sorting them in a reasonable taxonomy, etc.

There's a lot of terrible sites like this that either have bad data, bad navigation/taxonomy, overladen with ads, or try to force their viewer versus allowing a pdf download, etc. This site, after a quick once-over, seems pretty nice on all those counts.

Well however he did, I do not see his responses after posting it here. Is it even legal to scrape all these manuals from other sites?

It wouldn't be the most famous site full of copyrighted material.

It should be illegal to withhold a repair manual from a owner of the device.

We already have a situation where in theory you can make a backup copy of any movie your bought, but in practice DRM prevents you from doing so. Thats when DRM is not installed as spyware.

They are riding rough over us, abusing laws invented in previous millennium to protect poetry and novels. We need to fight for our rights.

Asking this is inevitable, but in wildly poor taste.

Hi We have been collecting this library for a long time. Regarding legality, we hide the documents of those manufacturers who do not want to publish them. But there are very few of them.

What makes you think they paid at all? You can Google all these manuals you know. They show up on many other sites and I doubt manufacturers care.

Hello, it looks nice but have a look https://manualsbrain.com/en/ it's bigger and grows

And is overrun with spammy ads. Yuck.

Your privacy policy mentions fixlib.com which appears to be up for sale.

Curious: how did you get hold of all the manuals, and hope did you process them all?

Thank you. We'll fix this problem asap. Fixlib was the temporary name. But we decided not to buy this domain.

This is very cool and useful, will be bookmarking for sure. Some of the websites you come across when googling manuals are... less than reputable.

My first suggestion after browsing around for a while is that you need a better embedded PDF viewer. Some manuals are not readable at all[0], it would be cool if we could zoom in. It's especially disappointing because of the huge amount of wasted space in the main pane - why is there a huge light-blue border around the content I want to see?

[0] https://imgur.com/a/3fTVyc0

Hi! Thank you. Great suggestion! We'll add zoom features next week.

This is less spammy than most of these databases, but please remove the captcha on “download pdf”.

Also, the first (and only) manual I tried gave a 404 after I solved the captcha. :-(

OMG. Indeed, the download module was broken. We've fixed that. Many thanks.

There was/is a German startup called “manualOne” which offered manuals as well, and I think the idea was to establish a connection between the customer and seller of devices (like a fridge or whatever), where the customer buys the fridge in an electronics store. Normally the seller would be “blind” as it does not know its customers. And offering manuals and whatnot would help to establish the b2c relationship.

Looks very cool! A couple things however that I noticed. There seem to be a lot of duplicates which clutter the search results. Also, the first thing I looked for was available, but the correct result didn't appear until the second page.

Thank you. We have just launched our website. We will try to make the search better ...

Data seems to be quite old, since it does not include e.g. OLED TVs.

https://manuzoid.com/brand/LG

1) I had very similar idea, How are you planning to monetize it ? 2) 10 years back I made a similar site using manuals online.com, 3) did you look at react-pdf ?

1. We'll add some adsense ads. But all features will be always free. 3. I'll look. Thank you.

is it possible for us to talk ? @bitgur ? I have done very similar things and i am not sure if its really worth the effort. make sure u use nextjs ( static rendering ) and cloud-flare to at-least make things, fast and useable. Also, go mobile first on day 1, as google is moving to mobile 1st to rank web users,

Amazing, bookmarked.

Where did you get all of them from, and is there a way of contributing manuals?

Hi! Thank you. We have been collecting this library for a long time. And we'll be adding the ability to upload manuals soon.

This is very cool :) would love to read a blog on the making this project :)

good luck!

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