Searching the Unsearchable with Greplin, and So What

When you enter something into Google—or Bing or Blekko or anything really—you are of course not searching the entire internet. There’s a vast land beyond that remains uncachable/unsearchable by search engines, mainly because they’re under password protection.

Good! Right? Well what if some 19-year-old Israeli kid on hiatus from his mandatory military service came along with a tool that could gain access to that forbidden land? With your permission, of course. Enter Daniel Gross and Greplin (Remember “grep”?), a search engine for your private stuff.

The idea’s pretty simple. (According to Gross it was conceived in less than 48 hours at a Y Combinator program, the idea incubator/venture capital thing that gave us reddit and Disqus.) You give Greplin your login information, and in return it gives you the capability to search for all of your private stuff, and apparently just that stuff. So, like Google Docs, non-public social media stuff, and, ha, what else?

I went ahead and signed up because I’m a tech writer and I guess it’s my job. Here’s the answer:

Yes! Greplin, you had me at LinkedIn. Maybe its the Luddite in me talking or maybe this is just a stupid idea, but even if I were a member of the small class of people that uses things like Salesforce and Highrise, I still can’t imagine a need for this, at least to the extent that I would feel comfortable giving a web startup all of my login information, which Greplin obviously needs.

But someone somewhere thinks there’s totally a need for this: Greplin’s racked up millions of dollars in funding. I suppose my negativity hinges on my being somewhat agnostic about the cloud-computing revolution—you know, from applications to documents, nothing local—which would seem to be what Greplin is anticipating. Your computer’s search can’t well search for what you have stored in the cloud nor can Google et al, so enter Greplin.

From a Q&A posted on inc.com last week, to wit:

You say you’re not trying to compete with Google, but what you’ve created seems a lot like Google for social media and cloud-computing. What portion of your data lives, personally, is in the cloud? I had this realization a few days ago when I thought I lost my laptop. Then I realized I don’t think I have a single piece of information that’s solely on my laptop. I think I’m indicitive of a future generation.

Or you’re indicative of the second dot-com bubble. Dunno.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

Image: National Audubon Society