Two things a guide needs that a search box cannot give you

Two things a guide needs that a search box cannot give you

There is a genre of website that looks like it solves a problem and then quietly does not, and it is almost always the same genre.

A guide site. You arrive with a question — how do I do this specific thing in this specific game — and you get a wall of text, a search field that searches nothing, and a page that was written three years ago for a version of the game that no longer exists.

The writing is often fine. That is not the problem.

The problem is the shape of the answer

A guide is a sequence of steps, and steps are only useful in order. When a guide is a single long page, you cannot jump to step four, you cannot link someone to exactly the part they are stuck on, and you cannot tell which part is about their problem.

A list of small pages, each one answering exactly one question, fixes that. You can link to the one step. You can search it. You can tell, at a glance from the title, whether it is your problem.

HowGTA is built that way: a separate page per topic rather than one endless guide, so the thing you are stuck on has its own address and its own title. That is HowGTA, and the site is at https://howgta.com.

The other thing: it has to be playable

There is a category of reference that only makes sense with sound or with motion, and most of the web handles it badly.

A song you want to learn is a sequence of notes, a chord progression, and a melody that you follow by ear. A text description of it is almost useless. What you want is to see the notes fall as they play, to see the chords form on a staff, and to try it yourself.

MidiPlays does that: MIDI songs you can play on piano, guitar or wind instruments, with falling notes, full chords and a sheet music view, and a browser player that loads your own local files too. That is MidiPlays, and the site is at https://midiplays.com.

What the two have in common

Neither of these sites is trying to be big. They are trying to be addressable.

A page that answers one question has one title, one topic and one link. That is all it takes for it to be found by somebody who needs it, quoted by somebody else, or bookmarked by you for the third time this month.

It is a low bar, and most sites do not clear it. The ones that do keep working for years without any effort at all, because the work of finding them was done by the people who linked to them.