How does greplin work

According to the developers, that takes about 20 minutes or so. Maybe a bit longer. Head back over to Greplin and start searching. Doing this will search all of the applications and services that you set up in Greplin for that term. That could be a lot of results. You can also select the any one of the applications and services that you set up to work with Greplin. Once Greplin returns the results, click on any header to open that result in a new browser tab or window. About the Author:. Alex Stone Virginia-based web developer.

I'm into cool ideas and phones. Related Content. Application Development. Find out more about In my 3-day test, adding a new source was fast, but it did not remove the mailing list spam that I marked in Gmail. One great use of Greplin would be for shared and institutional accounts, like those of small business, local libraries, and non-profits. Actually, given the pace of institutional change, I suspect that large corporations also have trouble keeping track of their social networking.

It would be very helpful for checking public statements and achieving consistency in their statements. For personal use, however, privacy and security are more of an issue. Using OAuth and Facebook Connect mean that Greplin does not store user names and passwords for other sites, which is good, because even if they are hacked, those other accounts are not vulnerable, though all the indexed information may be exposed.

It is a little reassuring to know that Greplin will delete all information from the index when needed, within 20 minutes. Was it a Facebook event, or in an email, or in his calendar? And despite Greplin's appeal, it will be awhile if ever before I'd trust any startup with sensitive information such as e-mail in fact, I still won't even trust Gmail with messages that must truly be private.

That said, though, the service clearly fills a need. Yet the data isn't as useful as it could be if you can't find what you're looking for when you need it. Greplin appears to have some sleek technology behind it, and I hope its new round of venture financing helps it get even better over time. Meanwhile, I await more details on how far we can trust the company to keep information private and secure before adding too many more services to be indexed.

Sharon Machlis is online managing editor at Computerworld. Her e-mail address is smachlis computerworld. You can follow her on Twitter sharon , on Facebook or by subscribing to her RSS feeds: articles blogs.

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