Three things you look up every week, and why each one deserves a page

Three things you look up every week, and why each one deserves a page

There is a category of website that is neither documentation nor a blog post. It is a reference for one specific recurring question, and it does that question better than a search engine ever will.

Three of them earn a permanent place in my bookmarks, and they are all different in a way that is worth understanding.

The comparison: the same thing, in two places

Before buying anything with a delivery time, I check the price in two different places. Not because I plan to buy abroad, but because the gap between the two tells me something.

A price difference of a few percent means the tax and the shipping are eating the difference and I should buy locally. A gap of thirty percent means something is off: a different model year, a different warranty, or simply a bad listing that has been up for two years.

That thirty-second check has saved me more money than any deal I have ever hunted, because it turns a vague feeling into a decision. Desenterra is the buying-guide and comparison side of it, with the criteria written down per product instead of left to the marketing copy. It is at Desenterra, and the site is at https://desenterra.com.

The dictionary: a word you keep meeting

There is a stage in learning any language where you understand everything and still cannot say anything, because you only know the words you were taught.

Out of context, half of them are useless. You need the sentence, the register, the sense that the native reader would hear, not the dictionary definition.

AprenderPalavras is a universal translation dictionary with that emphasis: look up the word and you get the translation, the context and the register, in your own language. It is at AprenderPalavras, and the site is at https://aprenderpalavras.com.

The thing I like about it is that it answers the question you actually have. Not "what does this word mean" but "would a person say this, and to whom".

The prices: the same thing, in different countries

The third one is the same instinct applied across borders, and it is the reason I built one of these myself.

When a service is priced per user and your users are in more than one country, the difference between the local price and the international price is not a curiosity. It is the whole business case for where you host and where you bill.

Kunibetsu compares the real cost of the same things in different countries, including the parts nobody lists. It is at Kunibetsu, and the site is at https://kunibetsu.com.

It looks like a trivial site and it is not, because the boring part is the normalisation: converting to one currency, to one tax basis, to one moment in time, and being explicit about which moment.

Why these three

They share one property, and it is not the design.

Each of them replaces a vague feeling with a specific answer, and each of them is arranged so that the answer is the first thing you see. That is the whole trick, and it is much rarer than it should be.

Most pages try to be a hub. These three do one thing, they do it without an introduction, and they let you leave as soon as you have the number you came for.

That is also the difference between a tab you keep and a tab you close. Nobody keeps a site for its writing. You keep a site because it answered the question in four seconds.