Autocomplete Your Life With Greplin

Our lives are increasingly dependent on the cloud to get things done, collaborate, communicate, share stuff with peers and much more. Internet in fast becoming an operating system by itself with all the web apps replacing the desktop counterparts. One major thing missing out of this pretty picture is the absence of a comprehensive search feature.

Am not referring to web in general – the ability to search our own data stored in the cloud, distributed across a lot of third party datacenters. Greplin is a personal search engine that allows you to search all your online data from one easy place. Curious as to how Greplin can help autocomplete your life?

Overview

Greplin indexes the information you create on different websites (like Gmail, Twitter and Facebook) and provides lightning fast search of all your information. Add as many indexes of your favorite websites as you like. Start searching all your data in one place. Immediately!

Greplin is in public beta and is free for everyone at the moment. Head over to their homepage to get yourself an account after a blazing fast sign up process that just requires an email address and password to get going.

Ease of Use

You will land on an overlay that showcases the list of apps that can be indexed. To the credit of the Greplin team, they have got quiet a few and a lot of them are uber popular services like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Evernote among others.

I started the process with my Dropbox account. As soon as I clicked on the Dropbox icon, I was redirected to the Dropbox login page. Since the login happens at the Dropbox page, Greplin is not storing any of your credentials.

When the Permission Page shows up, approve the app access to the Dropbox account. Measures like these would definitely help convincing the privacy conscious crowd. Once your approval is recorded, you will be seeing the same overlay with the list of services for you to add for further indexing.

I chose to add my Twitter account and as before I was taken to the Twitter page that allows Greplin access to your account via OAuth (meaning Greplin still has no access to your username and password). When I was brought back to the services page again, I chose to skip it and start searching.

Accessing the Search Index

Greplin informs that it might take sometime to index the entire content of the apps you have chosen. What could have been better is a page indicating the status of each indexing process. The search bar indicates the number of files available in the index for search. But that does not inform us if an entire app has been indexed or not.

Before initiating a search, you have access to a whole lot of filters to fine tune the search. From options to select a particular web app to search to the type of the content, Greplin has got all the filters to maximize the performance of the search results.

I executed a search for the keyword Web.AppStorm and found that results were shown in two different sections — Streams and Files. The results in the stream were from the Twitter timeline and contained tweets from Web.AppStorm (whom I follow).

To know how perfect the results were, check out the image I have attached above. As you can see, there are tweets that were from Web.AppStorm and tweets that I have mentioned Web.AppStorm. In short, nothing escapes Greplin’s algorithm. The short URLs associated with tweets below the profile pic of the user is a nice touch.

Files View

The files view displayed both files and folders that match the search keyword. Like in the case of Stream results, file results are also limited but more of them can be accessed by selecting Get more files. If you choose to access a file or a folder, you will be taken to the respective URL of the web app in a new window.

Updating Indexes

To add, edit or delete an index, got to the Settings page. From here, you can also rebuild an index from scratch, if you feel that newer files or updates are not showing in the search.

Pricing

At the beginning of this review, I mentioned that Greplin is totally free for everyone. That’s true. But they do have a well thought pricing structure.

All plans comes with the same set of features and the only thing that differentiates them is the number of items indexed per category. The categories available are – Messages, People, Files, Streams and Events. The awesome thing is each category has its own limit and hence you can be assured that content from one heavily used category doesn’t clog the rest of them. The prices seem reasonable but I wonder why they have hidden it way inside the app.

Final Thoughts

Greplin could well become the next Google. The ease with which the service crawls and indexes data from a bunch of different databases and web servers is simply mind blowing. What goes against Greplin is that they have access to all the data stored in your cloud – both personal and professional. It might not be a service for people who are very conscious about their privacy. Given the fact that they are a small startup that is virtually unknown, it might take awhile to get people to use the app. But one day not so long ago, Google was a tiny startup too!

Share Your Thoughts!

How concerned of your privacy are you? Will you be trying out Greplin to see how useful it could be or just shy away from it?