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.<p>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.<p>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!<p>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.<p>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.<p>Planning to add in price comparison functionality and more data per knife in the next week.<p>PS: Images are a little shoddy, working on that.
I'm a knife collector, so this site seems cool.<p>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.<p>One major reason why people like knives is that they look beautiful. The image thumbnail does the complete opposite.<p>Please use 24bit PNG with proper alpha, on a lighter background, so blade shape and colors can be more beautifully represented.
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.<p>Otherwise, functional features would be awesome! Folding/fixed should be at the top of that list.
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....<p>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 <i>not</i> the same thing, and the powder version has substantially increased toughness.<p>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.
Wow! Thank you! It’s an interesting (and expensive!) hobby.<p>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.<p>If there exists good knife silhouettes it may be possible!<p>Either way congrats on the great site!
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?<p>Journey of a thousand miles and all that, but building the inventory feels like the most vital, yet boring part of the entire endeavor.
> 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<p>A lot of hobbies have this same problem. Dunno why there isn't a self-host solution. Something like <a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/" rel="nofollow">https://pcpartpicker.com/</a> but flexible to any type of product/community
Cool idea, could imagine myself browsing quite a bit, but I found it hard to work with.<p>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)<p>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.<p>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
First check: Spyderco R C67<p>Result: Spyderco R C67 GFP shows up, but not the original knife or any of the other variants.<p>---<p>Second check: Benchmade mini AFCK<p>Result: found three variants, two of which are the same 812S.<p>---<p>Third check: A.G. Russell Lightweight One-Hand Knife<p>Result: no A.G. Russell knives.<p>---<p>Fourth check: Kershaw Leek<p>Result: found 10 variants, none of which is the base model.<p>---<p>Fifth check: Gerber E Z Out<p>Result: found 4 variants, none of which is the base model.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
Somewhat related - I received what I thought was a really nice Buck Knife for Christmas from my father who is notoriously frugal.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>All this is to say that I had no idea this whole underworld of counterfeit knives existed.
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.<p>But, proper drop downs would help a lot, I can’t always remember all the terms.<p>And, once I’ve found a knife, showing one’s with similar features would be really cool.
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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>Some other suggestions:<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>* 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: <a href="https://www.knifegeek.io/blades/boker-121589" rel="nofollow">https://www.knifegeek.io/blades/boker-121589</a> which I presume you scraped from here: <a href="https://www.boker.de/en/vollintegral-2.0-jaeger-gold-121589#90f72c88247b368ccfe8f5b16a2da9f8" rel="nofollow">https://www.boker.de/en/vollintegral-2.0-jaeger-gold-121589#...</a> but you should maybe have a secondary scrape for stats that are impossibly beyond params. Here seems to have the correct blade thickness: <a href="https://www.knifecenter.com/item/BO121589/boker-jager-gold-vollintegral-fixed-blade-knife-polished-walnut-handles-leather-sheath" rel="nofollow">https://www.knifecenter.com/item/BO121589/boker-jager-gold-v...</a><p>* 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.<p>It helps the exploration. I might find something I think has nice features and want to explore that set more.<p>* 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.<p>Fixed vs folding vs others is ofc vital.<p>Within the category of folding, the type of lock, if any.<p>Blade shape, a no brainer.<p>Nice to have overarching categories too. Rescue vs dive vs bushcraft would help immensely.
Cool, a little feedback:<p>Back button is broken, for example search for balisong knives, click on one, click back - your search is gone.<p>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.<p>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.
Pretty sweet, good job outta you!<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>More things should be links. Like if I'm on<p><a href="https://www.knifegeek.io/blades/pro-tech-malibu" rel="nofollow">https://www.knifegeek.io/blades/pro-tech-malibu</a><p>Most all the words on the page should be links. "Pro Tech", "Wharncliffe", "Damascus", "Malibu" etc should all be clickable to view similar things.<p>Oh, and you should add a metadata field for locking mechanism.. fixed, friction, lockback, liner, frame, button, axis, butterfly, etc.
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.<p>[0] <a href="https://imgur.com/NYQYEOK" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/NYQYEOK</a><p>[1] <a href="https://imgur.com/HUJrgm7" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/HUJrgm7</a>
I love it! a filter to search based on if the knives have an emerson opener would be a cherry on top.<p>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 ;)<p><a href="https://im.ge/i/alaVhY" rel="nofollow">https://im.ge/i/alaVhY</a><p><a href="https://www.knifegeek.io/blades/kershaw-7100-grybw" rel="nofollow">https://www.knifegeek.io/blades/kershaw-7100-grybw</a>
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.<p>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?