Greplin is a new search engine that only looks against your own private social data. Developed by a small and young founder, it looks against all of the data that Google never sees. In this screencast I walkthrough setup, adding accounts and my opinion of data security.
You can also watch this in HD and all the network videos on the Spiked Studio Productions channel on YouTube
Greplin was brought to me as a review site with the added question of data security. Using oAuth, the service pulls your data from a list of public services (see the screencast) and immediately begins to index the data found. So the initial steps do not disclose your login information, with the flexibility of oAuth. However, you are exposing personal data across as many networks you connect.
All of the site access is done via SSL, a great first step. However, once you trust your data, you must make the login into Greplin as secure in password quality and strength as you would use for your Google email, apps and even LinkedIn.
How the data is stored by Greplin is not covered in their FAQ, nor was found anywhere else on the site. I would like to see this added in to provide a better sense of comfort.
Outside of that, the service itself was very fast and responsive. New search abilities are being added. The prebuilt features did give some immediate benefit of things or associations I may have missed previously. My test search for iPad in the screencast even turned up come results I missed over time.
The goal of the site is to provide a single search source, fully indexed and finely tunable. I would hope that eventually they bring the ability to act on something found in search. For example, if I find a Twitter posting result, I could click and retweet, reply or star. The same for email, LinkedIn data and even items I bookmarked into Evernote.
This is a promising service I intend to use as service is expanded, search capability is extended and data storage privacy policies are listed. Go visit Greplin today.
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