Show HN: KnifeGeek – Online Database of Pocket Knives | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: KnifeGeek – Online Database of Pocket Knives

knifegeek.io

140 pointsICodeSometimes88 comments

Hey HN! About a year ago i stumbled upon the world of swords, knives, and EDC gear. A weirdly addicting (and expensive) hobby to have.

Back then i noticed something, it was quite tedious to easily sift and search through knives based on length, steel, brand, and what not to find the knife for me. There were some great youtube channels that helped me pick out what i wanted however i had to sit through multiple 30 minute videos just to review 10-15 knives or so each.

Recently i've been having a little trouble sleeping so i decided to pickup a new passion project to work on late at night, here's KnifeGeek!

it's a completely free website where you can search, filter, and sift through an extensive knife database (over 60K+ knives) and add them to your collection or wishlist. You do need to sign in to add stuff to your wishlist or collection and after a bunch of advanced searches.

Please check it out and let me know if you think anything is missing! I'll try to flesh it out more on a daily basis if people find it cool or useful.

Planning to add in price comparison functionality and more data per knife in the next week.

PS: Images are a little shoddy, working on that.

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I'm a knife collector, so this site seems cool.

One thing that can be improved is how the knives are displayed. The white aliased border around the thumbnails looks really really bad, and really turns me off from staying on the site.

One major reason why people like knives is that they look beautiful. The image thumbnail does the complete opposite.

Please use 24bit PNG with proper alpha, on a lighter background, so blade shape and colors can be more beautifully represented.

The hover effect, too. Nice experiment to learn something, now it's time to burn it with fire.

This made me laugh quite a bit, took over an hour to do that hover thing and i felt fancy for it too. I just removed it as i agree it looks a little shoddy

It's better, but I think maybe your browser isn't rendering things the same way mine is, so I took a screenshot for you. There's transparency issues with the knife images, which I bet is part of why the hover looked so bad for me, and why you're getting complaints about the visuals. I'm guessing it doesn't look the same for you.

This is chrome on ubuntu: https://imgbox.com/mCWq87NW

> The white aliased border around the thumbnails looks really really bad, and really turns me off from staying on the site.

That is completely fair, looking into ways to improve the images now. Agreed that blades are quite beautiful and the website should do em more justice. Thanks a ton for the input!

Adding to this: Getting people to write reviews on your own platform will be hard, but there are a ton of knife enthusiasts on Reddit and we've aggregated their opinions on Looria. Happy to give you access to this data if you're interested :)

r/Knifeclub: https://www.looria.com/reddit/knifeclub/products

r/Knives: https://www.looria.com/reddit/knives/products

r/EDC: https://www.looria.com/reddit/edc/products

Wow, very cool site. Searching for some highly gamed products like graphics cards brings up ratings from multiple sites, not just reddit, and gives realistic results. It seems like it's human-curated for now though, searching for "tap" or "tap set" doesn't bring up anything at all, although the search for "tap" brings up tape measures.

Plus, this comment is how you do marketing well, not pushing your own site at all but adding something helpful to the discussion. I'm definitely impressed with my initial look at the site.

Back on topic, I really like all the different search parameters, but especially for knives you should probably have a price min/max slider. When I was last looking for a knife, it was a PITA since many of the enthusiast recommendations were focused on $200+ and hand-forged one-off knives. I know price is way harder to filter by, but that would be a genuinely useful addition since when I was shopping I knew that I wasn't going to spend over 150 but I also wasn't interested in anything under 30 since it was almost certainly junk.

The knife geek site is super impressive though, I really like how fast and responsive the UI is, especially if this is a weekend project.

Actually i've got the price data all in the DB but was just worried it would get out of sync pretty often and since i've only got a few sources.

Once i've got more sources per knife i'll go ahead and add in "Where to buy" links as well as pricing filters!

Wow what a dope service, love it.

I'd love to get access to the data, can totally drop a "Powered by looria" thing on the site as well :D

Can you shoot an email to hello@knifegeek.io w some details? Can take a CSV, JSON, api access, or whatever!

yeah essentially i was trying to remove backgrounds on the scraped jpegs by just swapping pixel colors which worked horribly, decided to just keep it as a plain white background till i setup some fancier solution to remove backgrounds

A small friction point is that middle click, ctrl-click, and right-click / open in new tab are all unavailable to access details for a knife. If I wanted to compare a few results, I'd prefer to open details in new tabs. Sometimes that's a nice way to put a pin in one thing and compare it to another thing that comes up in a different search. A select-to-compare option that opens a table (optionally in a new tab!) can also work okay if it's done well but that's a lot more work and not necessarily the level of reduction in load on your end that pencils out to being worth the effort.

Otherwise, functional features would be awesome! Folding/fixed should be at the top of that list.

Oh, yeah. Sites which disable the much-loved "command-click" are a PIA. Let people browse as they will; forcing them along your expected paths is inconsiderate and off-putting.

Used nextjs so this was Link component weirdness in action. swapped it out now and good to go!

> A small friction point is that middle click, ctrl-click, and right-click / open in new tab are all unavailable to access details for a knife.

just fixed it as soon as i got home. Should be good to go!

--- Select-to-compare functionality does sound super interesting though and could be useful, added it to my backlog :D

A permalink option would be great. More generally, putting search parameters in the URL would be great, for basic browser features like open-in-new-tab, bookmark, etc....

Something else that might help is merging aliases for steel types. "Magnacut" and "CPM Magnacut" are the same thing because all Magnacut is made by Crucible with a powder metallurgy process. This is error-prone though; "D2" and "CPM D2" are not the same thing, and the powder version has substantially increased toughness.

Next-level: let people search by groups of steels that are essentially copies of each other. M390, 20CV, and 204P are made by different companies, but the chemistry and powder metallurgy processes are nearly identical, producing nearly identical results.

> putting search parameters in the URL would be great, for basic browser features like open-in-new-tab, bookmark, etc....

Done!

> Magnacut" and "CPM Magnacut" are the same thing because all Magnacut is made by Crucible with a powder metallurgy process. This is error-prone though; "D2" and "CPM D2" are not the same thing, and the powder version has substantially increased toughness.

That's a great point, i'm currently ingesting more and more data and will dedupe fairly soon. Thanks!

> let people search by groups of steels that are essentially copies of each other. M390, 20CV, and 204P are made by different companies, but the chemistry and powder metallurgy processes are nearly identical, producing nearly identical results.

Ah that one may be a little tougher to do programmatically, likely needs manual curation which is fine

Here's a site that can tell you whether two steels have the same composition, though I'm not sure how the owner would feel about scraping.

http://zknives.com/knives/steels/steelgraph.php?nm=M390%2C%2...

It even includes manufacturing process information on individual steel pages:

http://zknives.com/knives/steels/Crucible/cpm_154.shtml

zknives.com/knives/steels/Crucible/154cm.shtml

Wow! Thank you! It’s an interesting (and expensive!) hobby.

I’m not sure how realistic this is, but I always wanted to be able to search for knives “with similar shapes”. Like “knives with fat a belly” or something like that.

If there exists good knife silhouettes it may be possible!

Either way congrats on the great site!

Thank you!

Actually thats a great idea and should be doable! I already do some analysis on the images. Will take a stab at it in the next few days and post back here.

> Will take a stab at it

Well done, sir

Ah, yes, totally planned pun :D

How did you build the database? Were you able to piggy back off of existing efforts or did you go vendor to vendor, scraping your way?

Journey of a thousand miles and all that, but building the inventory feels like the most vital, yet boring part of the entire endeavor.

Scraped my way through 15 sites so far. It's wildly boring stuff but someones got to do it

There are some general sellers (bladeHQ, knifecenter, mountain) where you can scrape thousands of brands at once which is helpful too.

> Back then i noticed something, it was quite tedious to easily sift and search through knives based on length, steel, brand, and what not to find the knife for me

A lot of hobbies have this same problem. Dunno why there isn't a self-host solution. Something like https://pcpartpicker.com/ but flexible to any type of product/community

There was a post the other day about this concept... open source databases for various datasets.

I think the main problem here is the lack of datasets! the most annoying part of this whole project is writing the scraper

Cool idea, could imagine myself browsing quite a bit, but I found it hard to work with.

I searched for "Opinel" and I only see the suggestions, I would have expected a way to have a search result page because with the small images there's no way I could identify the one I have or browse around in a meaningful way. (Also it seems to default to last autosuggest line, not the first, Firefox on Linux)

When I go to All Blades and Filter, I can input the brand but the results below don't filter and I don't see a submit button.

It's a shot in the dark but did you maybe focus a little too much on enthusiasts who want to look up a specific known thing and less to the casual user who only knows a few data points and browse around?

How did you approach the data population? The images of the knives are all consistently positioned, which is impressive, and there seems to be a decent amount of structured data for the number of entries you have

Scraped 15 websites, got a good pipeline that ingests and cleans the data once the scraping is done.

images get positioned according to simple logic (find top, find bottom, rotate, etc...)

data is cleaned and units are stripped accordingly (5 inches can be 5in 5 in 5inch 5inches etc...)

so far it's really trivial code so alot of measurements are getting dropped, need to go back in and fix it up and re-scrape/populate the data soon.

also using fp-ts to try out functional programming, it's really perfect for this type of thing, pipe reads really nicely here.

First check: Spyderco R C67

Result: Spyderco R C67 GFP shows up, but not the original knife or any of the other variants.

---

Second check: Benchmade mini AFCK

Result: found three variants, two of which are the same 812S.

---

Third check: A.G. Russell Lightweight One-Hand Knife

Result: no A.G. Russell knives.

---

Fourth check: Kershaw Leek

Result: found 10 variants, none of which is the base model.

---

Fifth check: Gerber E Z Out

Result: found 4 variants, none of which is the base model.

I own all of these knives. None of them is particularly exotic; they are all factory-made, with the smallest batch being 1200 for the R variant that I have, and probably many thousands for the Gerber and the Kershaw

As a longtime pocketknife enthusiast one search criteria I would love to see is a way to filter by rear flipper, thumbstud or thumb hole opener. I spent an hour last week trying to find a Kershaw that doesn't have a rear flipper tab as they tend to open in my pocket. It seems like almost all their models lately have rear flipper tabs but I would prefer a thumbstud.

And lock mechanisms. This doesn't help me find a knife with a flipper and a button lock.

Hi! It's been a week but just wanted to let you know this is in now! Also added 10K extra knives

When I search for "Folding blade" and blade length "0-3 in", I only get 7 results from your site. A similar search on BladeHQ gets me 12,000+ results.

I think you have too few knives labeled as folding -- I don't see any Spydercos or Kershaws that come back with the folding checkbox, and only a few CRKTs. A quick fix might be to hide the folding checkbox.

Please add a option to display metric units instead.

100% a good point. will get it done!

Done! Just released the update. You can set it either

- in the footer - on the advanced search page - on a knife details page

it's global for your user and stores it locally in the browser :)

Somewhat related - I received what I thought was a really nice Buck Knife for Christmas from my father who is notoriously frugal.

On returning home, I am curious what my dad paid for such a nice knife so I go on Buck’s website and cannot find it nor anything with a similar shape. I look to the box for a model number, nothing. No information on the box at all other than the logo and some talk of how amazing the warranty is. I scanned the barcode on the box, no results.

Then I get curious and Google “counterfeit Buck knife” and eventually I find a Reddit thread pointing me towards an Alibaba Express listing which is my exact knife sans Buck logo on the blade.

I am really curious where my dad got the knife, but I don’t want to bring it up to him. It’s still a very nice looking and feeling knife, we’ll see how the blade holds up of course.

All this is to say that I had no idea this whole underworld of counterfeit knives existed.

It's huge, especially for premium, arguably overpriced US brands like Benchmade, Spyderco, and Microtech.

I’m not much of a knife guy but have a couple and know what I’m looking for feature wise, less so on specific steel types.

But, proper drop downs would help a lot, I can’t always remember all the terms.

And, once I’ve found a knife, showing one’s with similar features would be really cool.

> But, proper drop downs would help a lot, I can’t always remember all the terms.

Just shipped an update to list all values! That's a good point.

> And, once I’ve found a knife, showing one’s with similar features would be really cool.

Comparisons sounds totally useful, added it to my backlog. Thank you!

I want to get similar website for other hobbies. I am good at getting the dataset but I am weak at web development. Whats the stack behind website? Is there an easy way I can create similar website if I have dataset ready?

So this might be tricky, but seeing as there are different laws about carrying knifes, it might be a good idea to start to collect laws by jurisdictions, so that users do not end up wanting what they cannot legal have.

There are more than 50 jurisdictions in the US alone. Massachusetts has a particularly odd law, which was apparently written by a staffer who had just watched too many Shaw Brothers wuxia films:

Whoever manufactures or causes to be manufactured, or sells or exposes for sale, an instrument or weapon of the kind usually known as a dirk knife, a switch knife or any knife having an automatic spring release device by which the blade is released from the handle, having a blade of over one and one-half inches or a device or case which enables a knife with a locking blade to be drawn at a locked position, any ballistic knife, or any knife with a detachable blade capable of being propelled by any mechanism, slung shot, sling shot, bean blower, sword cane, pistol cane, bludgeon, blackjack, nunchaku, zoobow, also known as klackers or kung fu sticks, or any similar weapon consisting of two sticks of wood, plastic or metal connected at one end by a length of rope, chain, wire or leather, a shuriken or any similar pointed starlike object intended to injure a person when thrown, or a manrikigusari or similar length of chain having weighted ends; or metallic knuckles or knuckles of any other substance which could be put to the same use and with the same or similar effect as metallic knuckles, shall be punished by a fine of not less than fifty nor more than one thousand dollars or by imprisonment for not more than six months; provided, however, that sling shots may be manufactured and sold to clubs or associations conducting sporting events where such sling shots are used.

Can we get a converter so that we don't have to use imperial units?

working on this now (pushing updates every 10 minutes or so).

should have it done within 30! (apologies about using big mac units).

Done! Just released the update. You can set it either

- in the footer - on the advanced search page - on a knife details page

it's global for your user and stores it locally in the browser :)

It'd be great if there was this for flashlights too. I know there's candlepower forums etc but it's hard to really find what I'm looking for. There's so much on the market.

There is: http://flashlights.parametrek.com/

Being unable to middle mouse click knives to open new tabs is a usability dealbreaker for me. Wrap the image with links, not binding awkward events.

It'll also reduce your load a bit, as I won't have to continuously reload the grid page of 50 knives just to look at one.

Some other suggestions:

* If I search handle material "micarta" I get a whole bunch of distinct incarnations, like "micarta, ash wood burl" and "bone, micarta, wood". Tokensise each term in the material type and return them as groups. "micarta" should have both of those, as should "wood", and ofc "bone" would distinguish them.

* For brand search, populate the list alphabetically or something. It's nice to have a list to scroll to explore. I have no idea what options are available other than a few brands I already know. If the goal is to find and explore the 60k knives there, I need some help.

* Sanity check the knife stats. There are going to be zero knives with a blade thickness of 1", nevermind 5". An example of one that shows up here is this knife: https://www.knifegeek.io/blades/boker-121589 which I presume you scraped from here: https://www.boker.de/en/vollintegral-2.0-jaeger-gold-121589#... but you should maybe have a secondary scrape for stats that are impossibly beyond params. Here seems to have the correct blade thickness: https://www.knifecenter.com/item/BO121589/boker-jager-gold-v...

* From the knive page, present tags to re-broaden the search. Using that same knife example, the navigations is currently: `Blades -> Boker Jager Gold Vollintegral ...` which is useless. It's a knife in the category of knives on a knives website. I'd like to be able to navigate back by type / brand etc.

It helps the exploration. I might find something I think has nice features and want to explore that set more.

* An obvious one I'm sure you have planned, but there are much more crucial and interesting features than the ones listed for filters. I care far far more about the general style of knife than I do blade thickness or handle material.

Fixed vs folding vs others is ofc vital.

Within the category of folding, the type of lock, if any.

Blade shape, a no brainer.

Nice to have overarching categories too. Rescue vs dive vs bushcraft would help immensely.

Cool, a little feedback:

Back button is broken, for example search for balisong knives, click on one, click back - your search is gone.

Also, suddenly the search stopped working - maybe you just pushed an update? Now when I start typing into the knife type search I get force redirected to a login - but I don't want to login - I want to search.

Edit: Now I see in your description you force the login after a few advanced searches. I don't know why that is, but the experience is jarring. If you are trying to block bots a cpatcha is probably a better idea.

> Back button is broken, for example search for balisong knives, click on one, click back - your search is gone.

Not so much broken as non-existent XD. That's a great point though, will add in functionality to keep search state.

Yep forcing login after advanced searches was the quick option there, will definitely swap it out tonight.

Thanks a ton for the feedback!

On that note, search results don’t appear to be real links, so built-in open-in-new-tab functionality doesn’t work.

Yes, keeping this state in the URL makes for a much better user experience.

Playing around with the site, for me the search was also broken at some point. Unfortunately it was not reproducible for me.

On another note I sadly miss multitools

Pretty sweet, good job outta you!

One thing, I'd love to be able to filter by which knives are legal in my city (NYC). An approximation that might be easier than adding jurisdiction white/black lists/flags to the data might be specific custom filters.

For instance, in NYC I think the law is against locking blades and blades over a certain blade length. So a quick apply of those filter parameters would do a decent job of removing the items that would be illegal to buy.

I wonder if this, while being a really good idea, is next to impossible without some serious liability concerns. A lot of the time the law does not enumerate specific models of weapon, and there end up being grey areas where a weapon could possibly be characterized as having a banned trait.

Though it may work as you’ve described it: don’t have searches for “is legal in X?” But rather provide search for those criteria. Plus a big legal disclaimer that it could be wrong.

There are a few sites that summarize knife laws, for example:

https://www.akti.org/state-knife-laws/

https://knifeup.com/knife-laws/

They do, of course include disclaimers that they're not offering legal advice. I think attempting to combine that with a parametric search might be more legally risky, as it makes a specific statement of "X knife is legal in Y jurisdiction", which people might act on without further interpretation or analysis.

Fellow blade enthusiast here, so I love the idea. A minor data thing: when I search for “LT Wright” under brand, there are three entries. They just need to be merged.

Neat.

More things should be links. Like if I'm on

https://www.knifegeek.io/blades/pro-tech-malibu

Most all the words on the page should be links. "Pro Tech", "Wharncliffe", "Damascus", "Malibu" etc should all be clickable to view similar things.

Oh, and you should add a metadata field for locking mechanism.. fixed, friction, lockback, liner, frame, button, axis, butterfly, etc.

That is... a great point.

Thanks a ton! Planning to add pages for each brand (Kershaw, Benchmade, etc...) listing their knives as well as each attribute (steel, handle material, colors, etc.)

Seconding about lock mechanism. The first filter I looked for.

For some reason I'm getting scroll bars on some of the text fields in Firefox[0]. It's not just your site, I notice them on other sites as well like on Reddit[1], so maybe the fault lies with Firefox or even just my installation.

[0] https://imgur.com/NYQYEOK

[1] https://imgur.com/HUJrgm7

I love it! a filter to search based on if the knives have an emerson opener would be a cherry on top.

Also a filter for if the knives had assisted opening.

Here’s a better image of my Kershaw Launch 1. Has some custom engraving hope you don’t mind. Godspeed ;)

https://im.ge/i/alaVhY

https://www.knifegeek.io/blades/kershaw-7100-grybw

Neat! I'd love to be able to filter by lock type - is that something you've considered?

Glad you like it :). Yes, i'm actually working on that at the moment. Should have filtering by lock type, blade color, handle color, and use case out by tomorrow.

Very cool.

I tried tapping on the knife name several times before realizing I had to tap the image.

Oh snap, just pushed an update that should fix that. thanks for the feedback!

Thanks!

Speaking about images, please try to add multiple photos for each knife to show every angle. Great site, thanks for your effort.

Will do! Working on that at the moment :)

Dropdown menus instead of text input boxes would help, I'm a newbie to this world so I'm not sure what to search for.

Made them both dropdown menus + text input boxes, so you can search within hundreds of options :)

I think this is a great idea and looks very cool, I know my wife will look through it she loves knives like these :)

Thank you! Let me know if ya'll have any feedback, adding in more knives on a daily basis

As a person who never walks out without one (and, consequently, never relocated to Germany), I approve! :))

Reenactment, LARPing, competition fencing swords sure - but do people buy real swords with modern materials?

Are swiss army knives not considered knives in the knife enthusiast circles?

Yes

They are (though Leatherman style folders are more popular), but knives that don't lock in the open position aren't very popular.

Please add links back to the source for each knife.

Will do! Currently there are multiple links per knife so planning to show them all along w price data

Forcing me to create an account after a certain amount of interaction without explaining what the account is for, or providing any information about how my personal data will be used is an antifeature. Depending on the jurisdiction, it may also be a legal issue.

That said, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is a work in progress and that you'll be adding additional information about how you use my data soon?

That is a completely fair point, i'll bump up the interaction limit to 1000 while i figure out another way to rate limit interactions with the advanced search page.

Yeah you're right, i've been working on this for two weeks so far and haven't thought that portion out yet. Will see if i can add some form of anonymous login to avoid needing an email.

Just need the email to associate with an account to persist the collections + wishlists features at the moment

I think an explanation like this one would be a great start. A few sentences about the purpose of registration would go a long way.

Also, nice site. :)

You can do this with a persistent cookie. Of course the saved data won't transfer from device to device without a login. But username/password is sufficient for that so long as you don't allow freeform discussion. If you allow any kind of anonymous discussion then you've just created a new 4chan.

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