

Greplin’s Chrome Extension Now Makes Gmail Search Infinitely Better - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/15/greplins-chrome-extension-now-makes-gmail-search-infinitely-better/

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greattypo
I want to love Greplin. I hate gmail search, and would kill for anything
better. But giving a startup a complete database of my e-mails? That is a
little scary.

Anyone else have the same concerns?

~~~
kelnos
Yep. And above it looks like they use IMAP IDLE to watch for new mail in your
account, which presumably means they need your real Google password, and don't
go through the OAuth stuff (unless Google's IMAP server has an alternate auth
method). Deal-breaker for me.

Having access to all of my data... well... Google already has access to all my
data, and they were once a startup. Of course, Greplin could get bought by a
company with a poor privacy track record. So there's that to consider. I'm not
sure that alone would keep me away from the service, but it might.

Sigh... but it _is_ really cool.

EDIT: Neeeeevermind, just saw this:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2452068>

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Groxx
I hear about these long search waits in Gmail, but I have yet to encounter
them. Granted, I only have about 26k emails, but every single search I've made
completes within the second.

Also, killer feature question: does Greplin allow search operators, like
`label:`, `from:`, `has:attachment` ? And can it search _within_ those
attachments (not sure if any desktop clients do this currently, but I wants
it, Precious. I _needs_ it.)?

~~~
danicgross
from:foo, has:attachment, to:foo all should work.

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smanek
The coolest features:

" _Once you’ve started searching, you’ll notice that tweaks to your query show
up in real-time as you type each character, the same way they do on Google
Instant. And it shows results for partial-word matches (“Tech” would match for
both “Technology” and “TechCrunch”) — which Gmail doesn’t do._ "

And " _a message with 500k of attachments showed up in my search results
within a second of receiving it. Not too shabby._ "

Full disclosure: I work at Greplin :-D I'm just proud of the very cool stuff
my coworkers are building!

~~~
alooPotato
How exactly is the data from gmail gathered so quickly? Presumably they are
using a gmail API, but does that mean they are polling very frequently?

I guess another way to do it would be to create an auto forward to greplin
filter in gmail when a user connects their gmail account but that seems
wrong.....

~~~
rwalker
We use IMAP IDLE: <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2177>

~~~
a13ph
Is it used for indexing or at the moment query hits the search box? (I am
interested in how this process works in more words than 4 and less than in
that tech spec that i am illiterate about, sorry for that)

~~~
kevinclark
For GMail, our syncers hang out on an IDLE'd IMAP connection and process (and
then index) whenever a new message comes in.

Edit: So, to clarify, it's used to trigger an update to the index. Hopefully
this happens as close to the time the message hits the inbox as possible.

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sinaiman
I've never had a problem with Gmail search and I'm surprised the article
writes about 20+ second search times as if it's a common and widespread issue.

~~~
psykotic
I have around 45,000 messages in my Gmail inbox. My experience searching it
has felt sluggish for a long time. But really the fatal flaw is that search
terms have to be damn near exact. Gmail is a joke compared to Google when it
comes to fuzzy searches. I often find myself having to do several searches to
get what I want, compounding the issue of search latency. It's so bad I
sometimes give up entirely.

~~~
greattypo
I'm at 264,500. And yes, it's about as terrible as you'd imagine.

~~~
psykotic
Ouch. If you're anything like me, around 90% of your traffic comes from
mailing lists. Greplin could win big by inferring what mailing lists you are
on (along with beginning and ending subscription dates) in order to factor out
all relevant storage and indexing.

~~~
klochner
Do you need to store mailing list email? Usually there's a public archive.

~~~
mbreese
Sometimes it's just easier to search for things in Gmail. But since it is just
a mailing list, it's pretty easy to label it and kill it en masse if you need
to. At least, that's what I do.

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rxin
<https://www.cloudmagic.com/>

Try this. It builds a local index of your gmail messages. Instant gmail search
(and also matches partial keywords like Greplin). No worry about exposing your
data to a third party service.

~~~
wazoox
And CloudMagic is available for both Chrome and Firefox. This is important to
me because I'm a strict FF fanatic.

------
andrewcooke
"there’s one possible issue for those of you who are concerned about your
privacy"

for anyone worried about this kind of thing, there's a program called mairix
that will index and search your local maildirs. it's command line, but the
results can be used to populate another maildir folder, so it integrates
pretty nicely with clients - <http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/>

if you want something more C21 then there's also beagle -<http://beagle-
project.org/Main_Page> [edit: skip that; looks like it's a dead project;
recoll might be a good replacement - <http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/> ]

------
salsakran
I think all the talk of being faster than gmail search is going to last until
they actually get a lot of users. It's easy to make search fast for small
datasets.

~~~
psykotic
You're not making any sense. They can shard the hell out of their indexes
since all searches are user specific, so that's a non-issue. They can afford
to throw enough hardware at the problem if their business model works out and
they attract enough paying users. It's presumably not cost effective for
Google to offer a super snappy search experience through gigabytes of user-
specific data, which is why Gmail search sucks so badly for people like me.
(Does anyone know if search is way better if you're a paying customer of
Google Apps?)

~~~
salsakran
The existence of a way to shard searches doesn't make scaling real time search
on email (hint: do some back of the envelope calculation on how much data that
involves) a non-issue.

~~~
psykotic
Fair enough, I too readily dismissed your drive-by objection, however non-
specific and snide. Scaling real-time anything is never easy. My main point
was that cost effectiveness is what keeps GMail from offering a similar level
of search quality. If Greplin can get a large enough fraction of users to pay
for their service, the technical challenges are surmountable.

------
psykotic
It seems pretty promising so far. I guess my next Emacs hacking project will
be a Greplin source for anything.el. Has anyone written plug-ins for Spotlight
or Quicksilver?

For someone like me whose attraction is improved Gmail searching, I can't see
paying $4.99/month for this. Were my daily workflow based on Google Apps and
Evernote, it'd be another story.

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d_c
How do they access the data used to build their search index?

~~~
smanek
You have to sign up at <https://www.greplin.com>, and grant us permission (via
OAuth - so we never see your password) to index your mail for you.

See [http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/03/oauth-access-to-
imaps...](http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/03/oauth-access-to-imapsmtp-in-
gmail.html) for some details.

------
joelthelion
Soon these people are going to discover thunderbird :)

Why does history always seem to repeat itself?

~~~
Groxx
I keep re-trying Thunderbird, hoping it has improved, but keep abandoning it
because it keeps annoying me. _Especially_ that embarrassing contacts
importer.

But it's still the best I've found on Windows, so I keep installing it
everywhere, and helping others do so as well, especially at school (as the
school's setup info is about 3 versions of their email server behind).

~~~
a13ph
Isn't obvious way to fix outdated setup guide is to write-edit new? (if it
will cost less time to you rather than teach everyone in person)

~~~
Groxx
They won't let me. Despite working for over a year in what's essentially their
employee-tech-support / teach-me-how department. But yes.

