I recently discovered Greplin and I have a hunch this is the start of something big. Greplin is a search engine for your cloud services. In other words, it links to your Twitter, Google Doc, LinkedIn, Gmail and Facebook and allows you to search within all of them. According to TechCrunch:
“It’s dead simple to use. Sign up and authorize any number of social services for Greplin to index – I signed into Facebook, Twitter and Google Voice to start. After a few minutes of indexing time Greplin then presents you with a Google-like search box. Run a query and find the public and private data you’ve locked away on those sites. Tweets, including DMs, are shown, as well as Facebook messages and Google Voice voicemail transcriptions and SMS. You can also index Gmail, Dropbox, LinkedIn and a bunch of other services.”
Services offered by Greplin
My search result, victory!
Still a bit confused? Let’s say that I wrote something, or read something about “Puerto Rico”. I type it in the box and immediately it searches my twitter feeds, GDocs and Email. Lo and behold, I see old “tweets” and files containing the term.
Greplin currently comes in two flavors: Paid and free. The free version has support for Google Docs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and some parts of Gmail while the paid version gives you full indexing into your Gmail, Google Voice, Evernote as well as other services. The paid version will run you about $5 per month or $45 per year.
Greplin still has a long way to go, this being version 1.0 of the service, but its worth joining now. As we move forward, we will depend more and more on cloud services such as Google and Dropbox. Being able to search all of them on one page will end up being one of those things we thought we’d never live without.
Signing up is free, and depending on how many accounts you add, indexing may take a few days. But hey, what have you got to lose?
