Another search engine is on the horizon. This one, called Greplin, aims to let you search your cloud-based data and is really more of a personal search engine than a search-the-world type of application. Think of it as Google Desktop for the Web instead of your computer.
Greplin currently works with data stores and services like Gmail, Twitter, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Evernote, and of course Facebook. It also allows you to add additional services for ones that aren’t included out of the box.
It’s a freemium service, so beyond a certain threshold of indexed data, you would have to pay a monthly or yearly fee.
So far, I’ve tested it by indexing my Twitter and Google Calendar accounts and I was pretty impressed by how quickly it indexed both and was able to return fairly good results, even getting deep into my Twitter feed (which I can’t seem to do myself via the Twitter interface).
What’s missing so far is any mention of the word ‘security’. If I’m going to have some company, especially some start-up, index my personal data, then I want many, many reassurances about their security. While this is a ridiculously useful service, I’m not going to be using it very heavily until they make it abundantly clear that security is a top priority.