

Beyond Googling yourself: Greplin (YC W10) - danicgross
http://www.inc.com/tech-blog/beyond-googling-yourself--greplin.html

======
swolchok
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.

~~~
mtran
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.

~~~
swolchok
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.

------
kovar
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?

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

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

------
tokenadult
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...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/31/greplin-ycombinator-personal-
search/)

(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.

------
rodh257
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?

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

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

------
thiagofm
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.

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

