As search engines like Google and Bing scramble to best one another in developing algorithms to allow social media results to appear in internet searches, another company has taken the social search concept a little more personally.
Greplin has just come out of beta testing — and landed $4 million in additional venture capital from Sequoia Capital. The service searches social media closer to home: your Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Docs and Calendar, Twitter and Dropbox accounts.
As we connect with more and more people on more and more platforms, this sort of search can come in handy. If one were to, say, misplace a link from one’s editor (I will not confirm nor deny) and that link could have been sent over any one of the above communication portals, it could take quite a long time to manually hunt it down. Having a search tool to locate it in seconds (it didn’t take more than two seconds, actually) can bring a whole new level of efficiency to the work day.
Greplin’s basic service is free, but there are fee-based upgrades that offer more indexing space and access to additional search parameters, such as Google Apps, Yammer and Evernote.