Greplin (W2010) Releases Must Have iPhone App | Hacker News Reader

Greplin (W2010) Releases Must Have iPhone App

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62 pointsdanicgross27 comments

Sometimes I wonder what other people do with their phones to need these kinds of apps.

Personally I use my phone quite extensively to search for routes (google maps), to check my mail, to chat, take photos, play a few games, glance at the sync'ed calendar, listen to music, browse HN and... to make phone-calls.

Not a single time have I felt a need to search something from my "social graph", or my dropbox, or my calendar, or my facebook, or anything like that...

One use case is searching multiple gmail accounts.

I often need to search for a message in my secondary account (I'm logged into my primary acct in Safari on my iPhone). Before this, the options were:

1. Log out of primary account and log into secondary account (laborious, especially if you use 2-step auth) and search in the gmail webapp.

2. Search using the iPhone mail app (awful).

(Makes me miss Android's native gmail app.)

Greplin searches both email accounts and tons of other useful stuff.

GMail lets you setup mail forwarding of all incoming mails to a designated account and label them accordingly. It also lets you choose different email addresses to put in the From: header if you set this up. This way, you get all benefits of multiple accounts without all the hassle connected with signing in and out many times.

I have _many_ different email addresses, but they all (except of the one at work, for obvious reasons) forward the mail to main one, which labels them for me to know their origin.

Like+++++

I discovered this about 4 months ago and it's made my email life so much easier.

3. option / Open a new incognito window, I've been using this method to manage multiple google accounts for a while.

Or a second Firefox profile.

I think he was referring specifically to the painful nature of multiple accounts on the iPhone.

In the browser, we've had great luck with Google's multi-accounts feature:

http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=...

A couple things you mentioned here are great use cases of Greplin - to find that address you're getting a map for, to find phone numbers of the person you need to call, or to find out information about your upcoming sync'ed calendar event. Send me an email at robbyw at greplin dot com - I'd love to talk about if there is ever anything you wanted to find on your phone but couldn't.

I'd have to agree with the parent. Finding an address has not yet been a big pain point for me while on my mobile phone. It's either in my calendar or in an email. And if not I can type it in or speak it (on Android) to get directions --- I typically remember the address.

While email search can be slow and cumbersome at times it's what I would consider "good enough".

I haven't used the app though and it might change my mind completely. I'd love to not have to open an application to start doing something. I'd like to speak an address or say a name or start typing a number and the phone be able to guess what my intention is and provide the best options. Sounded like that's in part what it does --- but I'd like that to be a native function of the phone, not provided via an app. Wonder how doable that is on Android. Presume not at all on iOS.

Out of curiosity, how many of you use Greplin on a regular basis (> 1x/week)? A great concept and possibly great technology but not something I've gone back to.

I use it when in-app search fails. Sometimes gmail search is atrociously slow or doesn't find what I'm looking for, for some reason.

I also have multiple gmail accounts (don't ask why), so Greplin is way easier than searching through them individually.

The Chrome extension helps a lot -- I used Greplin less before it was released.

I've used it maybe 5 times since I joined the beta early on. It's really slick, and works perfectly, but I'm skeptical just how useful searching these social services can be for anyone. GMail already has amazing search, and the only other social service that I have a decent amount of data in is Facebook, which I rarely need to search.

What Greplin-supported services do you guys find the most useful to have searchable?

That's probably my experience as well. Email is the only thing I care to search for and GMail has a great search (the occasional slowness doesn't have me fleeing to someone else).

There have been times I want to find a tweet from a while ago but my tweets have so little value that I'm okay not finding it and moving on.

it's become a tab i keep open frequently - mostly to look up a file or email quickly.

i would use it more if they had a native desktop launcher.

I've used it a few times and it didn't work all that well. Most recently I searched for a tweet but couldn't find it. That was disappointing.

Not very often, but every now and then I want to find a tweet that I remember reading, and then it's useful.

I'd be interested in such a service that ran on a server of my choosing, without having to share my passwords with Greplin. I'd pay $15/mo for that.

It's even worse, you're not sharing your passwords, you're sharing your DATA.

https://www.greplin.com/privacy

Looks great, but I just don't trust small companies -- especially those set up by teenagers -- with that level of data. I know too well how too many people behave when they got access to the mail spools back in the day, this is that on a much grander scale.

There's something reassuring about being one user drop in an ocean of millions, as I am in GMail.

I'm not a fan of people pulling the "age" card. There are plenty of old men that have done tons of damage throughout history. It's fine to be mistrustful of small companies (I had that trouble with Mint initially) but there's no need to jab them about age. I wish I'd done something this kick-ass before I was 20.

Sure, it's as fallible as any blanket generalisation. But there are extra risks you take when young men are involved, and a lot of those risks are statistically quantifiable.

There's a reason they pay more (a lot more) for car insurance, and it's not because risk assessors are playing the age card. It's because young men are more risky.

(Of course, this also means they're much more likely to take the big risks required for entrepreneurship -- a tendency to risk-taking is not an unqualified bad. I think it's an essential quality. I just don't want to fly in planes flown by 19-year-olds, and I don't want them in my mail spool.)

We care deeply about user privacy and have systems in place to prevent anyone (including the founders) from looking at user data. You can find our privacy policy here: https://www.greplin.com/privacy

I agree with the sentiment Bonaldi's post in spite of your reply.

I read the security page, and while I understand that there are "safeguards" in place to say that the founders can't read my email, I find that kind of like me saying that I can't browse porn because I installed a porn web browser filter on my PC. I have all the passwords, so I can choose to turn that off at any time.

If I sign up for your service, your servers contain plain text copies of all of my data. If it's not in plain text, then it's encrypted with a key that you hold so you can decrypt it for indexing.

I think there is a market for technology like this, but I think it would be more turnkey solutions for businesses so that they can own and monitor access to their servers and data. Is this a direction you are considering?

I completely understand what you're saying. In your metaphor, our system is more like this: all "porn" I access is logged (and this log is sent to my wife) and only she and I together can unlock the filter. More succinctly: no single person here has all the passwords.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamirs_Secret_Sharing

I believe it may not help our cause to tell people we just sent their porn log to their wife...

I hope rwalker was being funny, because otherwise this is the most epic Eric Schmidt moment ever :)

If it helps any, he's no longer a teenager

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