Greplin: A search engine for your life

jblesage.com

20 points·jblesage··8 comments

It's so hard for me to fathom how tools like this can be businesses (in the long term). I'm sure it can be done, and similar things have made money in the past, but the privacy part of economics seems so skewed.

My data is worth tons to me, nothing at all to greplin, and a little bit to advertisers. How about I give greplin access to as much of it as possible, for some convenience that doesn't depend at all on network effects or even computing resources beyond what I have at home (or in my pocket)? At least when google does this kind of stuff they have other reasons not to leak or sell my data.

Good luck to greplin, though! Their success will mainly validate the PIM search space, which will help semweb enthusiasts like me.

Is Greplin mostly screen scraping your sites? I imagine there's a lot of data that people want to search that isn't available via the various APIs.

What happens when Facebook tells them it is against the TOS?

I believe they use Facebook's open graph API to scrape data. Facebook has been known to shut down access when you're taking too much information too fast without notifying them (as in the case of Twitter and Ping), but I imagine Greplin will take the time to notify Facebook of their intentions when before this becomes an issue.

I've also been using Greplin for a few days. For someone that uses multiple computers, accounts, etc--it's amazing.

I've used it twice in the week I've been signed up, and recommended it to one person who actually twittered that she needed some way to search her Twitter feed. That's more than I use most web apps :).

i'd only be willing to use this if it were run by google. sad but true.

Has exooglers working on it I think, does that count? :)

I love that name.

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