Hacker News Reader

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.)