Beyond Googling yourself: Greplin (YC W10) | Hacker News Reader

Beyond Googling yourself: Greplin (YC W10)

inc.com

29 pointsdanicgross15 comments

I just can't trust a service like this with the data they want to search. Google and Facebook are already weak points for privacy; giving one company access to both is a complete nightmare for me. I could do it in theory, but not without an extremely compelling use case.

I have my Facebook profile completely locked down from the outside world, and I make sure that what does get out there under my name is stuff I want out there. I am already wary of Facebook to the point that every-time they change something privacy related I feel like I may as well just delete my profile.

While I am intrigued as to how Greplin works I don't think I would ever want to use it because of the concerns you've stated and I myself agree with.

The Locker project has a similar goal but is completely open-source. You can run it on your own server if you don't want to put all your eggs in someone else's basket.

https://github.com/quartzjer/Locker

Check out Redwood, http://redwoodapp.com. It runs on your desktop and searches Google Docs, GMail, and Basecamp. Since there's no server intermediary, it doesn't have the same privacy concerns as greplin.

This article confuses some things but try it. I didn't get it at first either but it's a great idea and crazy easy to use. If you have tons of stuff spread out over multiple social networking sites, there's no easier way to search through your own online history. And our histories are just going to get bigger and bigger.

I can see the privacy concerns but you can select which platforms you want (or don't want) Greplin to have access to, so that's not such a big deal to me. For sites people use professionally, for organizing projects etc this is a great tool.

I looked at the list of platforms, and I did not want Greplin to have access to any of them. For example, GMail already has search, Facebook has confidential personal stuff, and Dropbox has confidential work stuff.

This'll make law enforcement and corporate investigations a lot easier. Issue a subpoena on one company rather than many. It'll make social engineering easier, too.

As much as I'd avoid this like the plague, I can see the value in it from a commercial point of view - all that information that can be used for advertising is in one place.

$5M? To a 19 year old? (And yes, he now has a team, but still ....) And people are saying that we're not in a bubble?

I assume PG uses this service himself, with his Gmail, Google Docs, and Dropbox. Right? No?

Greplin is not really like googling yourself. That analogy threw me off. It's a search engine for personal data.

If the article gets a significant detail like Gross's relationship to YC wrong, I wonder what else it's missing about the use cases or drawbacks of Greplin. As I Google Greplin, the submitted article here looks a lot like plagiarism of a Aug 31, 2010 article by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/31/greplin-ycombinator-persona...

(After edit:) Considering who submitted the link here, is the problem with both articles that they are built on reading press releases rather than on doing actual journalism? I'm confused now.

I was planning on experimenting with a similar thing for a university assignment. Though my main focus was going to be indexing links that are posted. Ie, on twitter if someone links to an article on continuous integration with teamcity, but just says 'great CI server' in their tweet, my search engine would still return resutls for 'teamcity' or 'continuous integration' as its indexing the actual links as well.

Perhaps Greplin could consider adding similar functionality?

Am I misunderstanding the nature of Y Combinator or did the article really miss the mark about Gross? He worked for Y Combinator?

You've got it right, the article got it wrong.

The idea is so bad and don't have that appeal, srsly.

But getting 5mi from investors made it really look awesome... or we are in a bubble.

I'm trying to imagine in what kind of situation I'll need "google" myself, but it's ok. Interesting.

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