​I recently began using a service called greplin which has changed the way I search for things in all my “life streams”.  Since I did a few optimizations I wanted to give a quite review of the service and then also share with all my readers some tips that I think can make it work even better.

Before I get into greplin, use this link to access it: https://www.greplin.com/r/c/738522

That is somewhat of an “affiliate link”, though NO money is involved.  It’s just my personal “refer a friend” link which earns both YOU and me “unlock credits” (as opposed to if you just go to http://greplin.com).

What is It?

Ok, so greplin basically lets you attach various data sources such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN, Dropbox, Gmail, Evernote, etc… and it builds a personal index of all of them for you (that only you can access of course). Then whenever you want to find something, you just search from their page (which pretty much looks like a blue version of google) and you get all of your results grouped by (and filterable by) result type (people, messages, streams, files, etc…) as well as data source.  It has all the cool AJAXy enhancements too like immediate results as you type and result refiners (facets) to narrow your results.

When you get started, you just add in your data sources and it starts the indexing process.  It seemed like wherever it was possible they used oAuth (or a variant, like Facebook connect), so they wouldn’t actually be storing your username/password, though I think there were a few where it might have.  All my data sources were a snap to set up, though when I first added my Gmail account it seemed to hang up on indexing.  I later figured out that this was just because I use my Gmail account to send canary emails to myself at my home-based email server every 5 minutes, and Gmail had stored all of these “sent items” – about 150k of them (ha!).  After I deleted all of those (which only took about 2 minutes in Gmail) things were much better.  I’m presently indexing Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, LinkedIN, and 2 Gmail accounts.  It says it’s currently indexing 20336 documents for me (always changing of course).

Though I’m only using the “free” index data sources, they also have available other sources that are “unlockable” which you get for free once you invite enough people and earn “unlock credits”.  Then there are “premium” data sources such as Google Apps, 37Signals Apps, Salesforce, Yammer, and Evernote that you need a paid account for (at the time of this writing it is $5/mo or $50/yr).  That’s too bad about Evernote, because I do use it heavily, but I don’t know if I can justify $5/mo to search it when I can search it for free elsewhere.

A Few Tips

If you use Google Chrome as your browser, install the greplin extension.  Not only does it add a little icon that lets you do quick searches, but it adds a shortcut in your address bar so that if you type g[space] (that is the g key followed by the spacebar) you can type your greplin search right in the address bar.  For those of you that don’t know it, you can do the same thing for a google search by typing g[tab].

If you have multiple Gmail accounts this is the perfect solution for being able to search across them.  After you add in your first Gmail data source just make sure you log out of Gmail completely in your browser so that when you go back to add the second (and third, etc…) it prompts you for another login instead of just connecting you to the one you’ve already added.  Also make sure that your Gmail accounts have IMAP enabled, but that you aren’t using the quirky “Advanced IMAP Controls” Lab mode.

If you want to use this on your mobile device, they have done a pretty good job with autodetecting and redirecting a mobile version of the search/results page which is very nice.  If you use an iPhone, while there is no App (yet), you can make your own by doing the following:

• Navigate to greplin.com – it will open in mobile mode.
• Scroll to the bottom and click the link to switch to standard view
• Pinch zoom all the way into the upper left corner so that all you see on the screen is the greplin logo (the cloud) centered or slightly below centered.
• Click the share button (bottom center) then choose “Add to Home Screen”
• Close browser.  You should now see an app with the greplin logo on the Springboard.  Click it (touch it?)  greplin should open up in mobile mode again.  If for some reason it isn’t, just scroll to the bottom and choose mobile version.  It should stay in that mode from there forward.

Now you have a quick way of accessing your personal search engine from your iPhone!  How cool is that?