

Greplin: A search engine for your life - jblesage
http://jblesage.com/2010/09/14/greplin-a-search-engine-for-your-life/

======
drewp
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.

------
vyrotek
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?

~~~
dustice
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.

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

~~~
araneae
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 :).

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

~~~
124816
Has exooglers working on it I think, does that count? :)

------
robertg
I love that name.

