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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

This thread is well timed, I was just about to pick a wiki solution and was leaning towards confluence. But search is really important to me.

What’s the prevailing wisdom these days on the best solution for an internal knowledge base/wiki platform?

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As for an ok way to manage internal knowledge, I've yet to see it. I've wanted to try out the Johnny Decimal System because if you can create a solid hierarchy of a filing system, everyone should be able to drill down to the right doc. Confluence search doesn't work. Neither does google docs. I think I now want the ability to just pull a local copy of a section of docs, say "all engineering," and just use grep locally.

What are your issues with Google Docs search? Just curious as I'm building a product to generate a better wiki out of Docs/Drive.

I tried to replicate an exact issue I had last week, but I can't which is interesting. I knew I had read a doc days earlier. I could not find it by partial title matches, content searches, nothing. I had to search email for "so and so shared a doc" to get back to the document. Of course, now I can find it the expected way. I routinely need to search things that are buried in docs, like our intern program. This was another one where I couldn't quite remember the title of the doc nor who wrote it. I searched and searched variations of things containing "intern" and even though I had been in the document within the last couple of weeks, I just plum couldn't find it. I had to go back to a calendar invite to find the doc. Part of the problem could be that sometimes people write things different. I might look for "precap," a part of a doc title I'd expect for interviews, but someone else stored it as "interview pre-read" and so I can't find it. That's why I like document hierarchies / trees for finding things. I can go HR -> interviewing -> $something_more_if_needed and browse a couple of files and find what I want. Labels are cool for when something fits into multiple locations in the tree.

Great insight, thanks!

Got one more that showed up yesterday. A doc was shared via link, but I didn't see where the link went so I searched for it by title (looking at the shared screen during a meeting). No results in google docs. Found the link, and the doc opened right up. It was shared and I wouldn't be able to find it.

I'm working on one, V1 is going to be released in a few days (you can find the link in my profile). It is meant to be a big improvement to Confluence if your goal is to organize the knowledge at company or department level. If you are a smaller team, Notion is what I would recommend as long as you are smaller than 100 people

Markdown + Grep

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