“A lot of nerds get that”, says Daniel Gross on what Greplin stands for. For the rest of us (who are not quite nerds), ‘Greplin’ stems its name from ‘grep’, a popular CS terminology for search. Search as an online experience (a need rather), is second to none. Google has been around for a while now, to do the job for us, well in most parts. There are different verticals to online search. Google controls the majority but there still is space left in the search market for smaller players to innovate – Blekko’s slash tag is an example. While Google can powerfully crawl the entire web, there are places, a search engine can’t go. Where exactly ? Password protected user data in the cloud and the social online data of those, that it isn’t on sweetest of terms with.

Greplin tries to be your search partner into these areas. Greplin is a a user-authorized search that can access your data on the cloud – Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, LinkedIn, Salesforce, and more. Founded by Daniel Gross, a 19 year old from Israel, 48hrs before his YC DDay (Y Combinator Demo Day). An intersting story – his own words. One might think why didn’t Google build something such themselves. Well, they could have if they wanted to. But being the search giant they are, they would have had stiff resistance getting into the cloud data of rival social networks and perhaps to a certain extent on the user front as well. So, this vertical of search had to be explored by a newbie.

It wasn’t a smooth go for Gross at YC with Amazon screwing his initial DDAY project over, completely. And just when the kid was getting a little restless, Paul Graham was there with his simple, yet magical words – go, build something that you yourself are a target audience for. Thanks Paul – those words mean something to all of us, me included ! And with a scratch model of Greplin, Gross took the stage. Struggle followed for the series A funding. But once he had it, things only went uphill – securing another round of VC funding from Sequoia Capital, getting Robby Walker on board. And the valley has been sweet on Greplin since !

Once you sign up for the product, you are asked to add your online accounts – Gmail/Facebook/Twittter/Google Docs/LinkedIn and the like one by one, some 5-10 mins for initial indexing (depending upon how extensive your online presence is!) and you are good to go. A clean intuitive UI helps too! Once you start typing your search query, you start getting indexed results, much like google instant. Corresponding to a search query, you get search results in the form of messages, people, streams from across your indexed networks.. The business model adopted is freemium. Basic necessary indexes are free (Gmail/Facebook/Twitter/Dropbox/Google Docs/LinkedIn) while other Applications like Yammer/Salesforc/Basecamp etc require you to choose a ‘Premium model’. Free and Premium models also differ on the no of messages/people/streams/files indexed. Greplin also plan on rolling out Google Voice and Google Reader soon !

On security concerns, Gross says :

For the bulk of the services that we offer for indexing today, we never actually capture your username and password, which I think is important to a lot of users. So you know, if one day, lets say, somehow, our accounts are compromised your password was never exposed to us. So it would still theoretically be safe.

While fundamentals work fine, there are glitches too. Sometimes a search query shows multiple instances of the same search result (mostly in case of a multi-threaded Gmail conversation). While users can index multiple Twitter profiles, the same support for Gmail/Facebook doesnot seem to be there at the moment. Also, perhaps the no. of messages/streams is a little less in the free model, as I couldn’t get hold of an year old Facebook update. I’d take the liberty to propose one refinement in the indexing algorithm (considering the limited no. on the messages/streams for FREE users) – the user’s streams/messages should be indexed first and then probably those of his friends (this is to say if my understanding is right !). Another feature that I as a user would like (maybe in days to come) : indexing of the user comments on the Facebook status updates. But it again boils down to a trade off between how deep the indexing is being done for a particular model ! And yes, one last thing – that chrome plugin ad right in the middle of the page is a NO !

Have actually written to Greplin support on these. Hopefully, they will listen to these little demands from their prospective users and provide a better user experience.

Overall Greplin is a yes for me.

Why ? One, because the user in me feels a need for the service (even though the frequency will be say 1/100th of Google search, but that is only going to increase over time) and two, because the developer in me would love to be a part of this project !

I can be reached at vikashbitmesra@gmail.com. My twitter feed @_Vikash.

Now, enter Microsoft.

Google vs Apple in 2010

There are unconfirmed reports that Bing may become the default search engine for Iphone. The World is changing. Isn’t it?

With Google and Apple exchanging body blows become the superpowers of the mobile  web. Here is a list of the things i foresee in the next couple of years.

• Android based phone become a major threat to the autocracy of Apple Iphone. The SDK for Iphone is available for only limited audience. I think, that is a major turn off.
• Barring Microsoft’s Pink Phone project, I see Microsoft becoming a major partner of Apple in providing enterprise applications (Office suite) to Apple products.
• Bing gaining a decent market share for searches through the Mobile web.
• Apple Mac-books remain limited to the limited audience and is further killed by the upcoming Google Chrome OS. Windows remains the mainstream OS.
• Apple using some new shitty policy to take on Admob.
• Google taking on Apple by adding multi-touch and then fighting the patent battle with Apple. Google have the money to do it and they must. (Update – Nexus One now officially supports Multitouch i.e the much famed pinch to zoom.)

With Apple coming out with its tablet (unconfirmed reports), making Bing the  default search for Iphones in the next couple of days and Amazon starting to project Kindle as a platform for developers, Google may have found its big partner in Amazon. There lies a big battle ahead for us.I am slightly bent towards Google on this, but at the end of the day all I want is a free super phone, which makes up for the cost by serving ads.

Let the wars begin.

Find me on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Find Microreviews on Facebook and Twitter.