Why Greplin is my favorite new startup | Hacker News Reader

Why Greplin is my favorite new startup

onlineaspect.com

20 pointsjoshfraser8 comments

I would never put all of the keys to the kingdom in one place, which is the only time Greplin becomes useful. Your e-mail inbox is, quite literally, a skeleton key to your entire online identity, and by extension, a great part of your life, and there's no way that I'm handing that over to someone to get GMail searches that finish a fraction of a second faster.

(Seriously, search your inbox for 'password' at some point. You'd be amazed how many plaintext passwords, or good-forever recovery URLs are sitting there. Just the knowledge of what accounts someone has is an absolute goldmine for nefarious people. I sincerely hope the Greplin people have invested significant, meaningful effort into security and have someone who lives and breathes it, because a single exposure would evaporate them overnight.)

If they get hacked one time it will haunt them for eternity. It's just like Mint in that regard. I sure hope they're putting in serious effort towards security.

i hope so too. they're asking for a lot of trust.

Please can anybody explain to me why gmail search is that horrible? In each greplin article somebody throws shit at it and I can't see what's so bad about it.

I think it's very useful, the only thing I miss is sort options.

The main complaint against Gmail search is speed. With a sufficiently large email history, the built-in search becomes unreasonably slow.

For me, there are two aspects of Greplin.

One is a global search across many different services including multiple google services as well as other, completely different services (evernote for instance I think). That is a very powerful new service.

Second is a search within gmail itself, that one, my experience shows, is probably good, and not easily differentiable for me as to google's own gmail search. (And it's potentially conflicting with ActiveInbox, but I'm not sure yet.)

But the universal search is very cool, and very useful.

It lacks some stuff like when you search for a name, say you wanted to search for Richard but you just remember his name started with Richar. Gmail usually won't show you any results for Richar but it will work, as expected, with Richard.

(This might not be the best example but Gmail is blocked by my company so I can't try this before posting.)

Greplin is cool, but I think it's cool for techies. I doubt my wife would bother to use Greplin.

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