For the last few days, I have been messing around with Greplin, self-billed as the search bar for your life. And so far, while not quite the utility I was hoping it would be (although I am not sure I can quantify that statement), it has been effective and useful.
Admittedly, because sometimes life gets in the way, I am trying to catch up on some emerging products and companies that have cool tools-and Greplin is one of them. I heard about them earlier this month when Sequoia stepped in with Series A funding.
The way Greplin works, after you register for it (I have invites for anyone that needs, although I don’t think you need them any longer) you register your social networks, email accounts (looks like gmail only right now). One nice thing is they include LinkedIn with Twitter and Facebook. One of my personal complaints is that I really do try to keep my LI professional based only and there are few bridges between my Facebook and LinkedIn. My Twitter is one of the bridges but not very effective.
Once set up and permission are granted, Greplin then acts as a search engine and crawls your networks and creates an index.
A couple of early adopter issues:
- There is a free version (which I use) and a premium version (which I do not use). I understand and support monetization, but it seems the lines are a little arbitrary. I can register 3 gmail accounts, but not Google Voice, or Google Docs. Dropbox is free but Yammer and Evernote are premium.
- I am not one to use most search bars in browsers, but this is one that I would use, but it does not exist.
- At this point, search returns are presented by platforms and then relevance-the options to be 100% relevance would be good.
All in all, for an early product its useful. I think once I can figure out what I am expecting-and watch how Greplin goes through its next few drops–I think it will become a great utility.
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