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Comment by noahmbarr | Hacker News Reader

We use Google and Box for work at a 100 person Series C startup.

Searching across all the locations for my files is a disaster : - one Local files on my work laptop (mostly synced via dropbox), - two Box (mostly in their web UI, with ~2 folders being "synced" locally), - three Google Drive (shared and authored files a like), - four Email, - five Slack, - six Files stuck in our business systems (like contracts that sit in Salesforce.com, Jira, etc)

It's an absolute mess. I can't imagine I'm the only one to be annoyed and losing productivity.

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If you are looking for seamless integration, you need to buy into an ecosystem. An ecosystem that offers all/most of these pieces of software and integrates them well. Obviously, not a lot of ecosystems exist that offer all these pieces.

Based on your apps list (Box, Drive, Email, Slack, Salesforce), there are two ecosystems that offer alternatives to all these apps - Microsoft & Zoho (I am with Zoho). Google is also in the mix if you add apps from Google Apps Marketplace.

So there are two options. 1) Pick an integrated ecosystem and integrate missing apps. 2) Pick independent apps and integrate all of them

You clearly are doing #2 and experiencing the challenges. It is only going to get exponentially worse as you add more apps into the mix.

Google used to have this thing called Google Desktop Search[1]. It gave you complete desktop search, but could plug other things in too.

It was completely awesome. Google canned it of course, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop

Sounds like we need a startup to connect the services of all these other startups together.

But then some companies won't play ball with their own storage services e.g. iCloud.

Then just reverse their official apps and call the same API yourself

There's nothing unique about iCloud, so just go with another provider that's less awful?

https://www.meta.sc

www.zapier.com

www.docuvo.com. Connects platforms and let's you do full text search with full visuals

If you use Google for email, #3 and #4 should both be searched from Gmail. Perversely Gmail's search UI is better and faster for Docs than the one built into Docs.

For the general problem, could all these searches be integrated into Mac's Spotlight system?

There are companies that solve exactly that. Xendo and Synata are the two I know. They've both been acquired earlier this year.

at least for your local files, give "everything"[1] a try. While it doesn't allow searching inside files, as long as you know the name you'll find it instantaneous.

[1]https://www.voidtools.com/

Windows only. Love it on my windows machines though, wish there was an analog for Mac/Linux

Why not just Google Drive (instead of Box)?

Compliance, strong orientation towards folder hierarchy (maybe it's just me), + Drive is pretty rough unless you use it to author the files also...

MS Office files (Excel, Word, PPT), saved in their original format, aren't amazing in Drive.

Would keeping everything locally and use the "cloud" only for backups be an option?

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