Tech - Search 'your' web


Google has recently been in the news for their latest update to search, called 'Search plus your world'. It is about showing google plus results in the search results. After the launch of google plus, it was inevitably going to be linked in with search. 

However, on the personal search space, there has been another startup making news. It's called - greplin - www.greplin.com. 'Grep' is from the old unix command. It is a 'freemium' service and the free features are quite enough for most users. You can link all your online accounts and all the information - mails, contacts, documents, tweets, facebook posts, dropbox and so on.


Overview:

  1. The centre of the page holds a search box along with a filter option.
  2. On the left, all your linked accounts and status show up.
  3. Above the search box, is the size of your personal index.
  4. There is an iphone app also available.
With each of us using many online services (facebook, linkedin, twitter, youtube, dropbox, evernote, tripadvisor, news sites or similar services), it is quite a chore to remember what information is stored where. It's like we all have our own 'personal' webs. My own experience has been that greplin is great at searching across all your sites / accounts. While the generic search engines will continue to be dominant, I think there is scope for services like greplin to grow.

I suppose, it is part of a broader trend where people can now choose - what information they want (contextual / personalised), in what form (rss / mail / tweet / podcast), choices to access it (browser / mobile / social), when they want to access it (home / away). If you use a lot of various services, feel free to try it out.
Location: Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, UK

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Meta Prompting for Success

Image
Meta Prompt  Regardless of the Generative AI model used, sometimes the model may refuse to provide a response for a valid prompt. Often the reasons cited are - "I don't know", "I am not trained for the task", "violation of safety/responsible/ethical guardrails". This is sometimes more acutely felt when using Generative AI models for creating images. Overcoming this behavior can be frustrating and time consuming. An approach is to ask the AI model itself to generate prompts so that the prose and nuances of prompting are aligned with how the AI model has been built. This is called meta-prompting . The theory is that the prompts created by the AI model would have better chance of working. Let's dive in to see if and how this meta-prompting works in Gemini .  How to Create a Meta Prompt As with all good prompts, start with a persona/situation that describes the overall context. Next, describe the task in detail. In this case, it is about creating some ...
Read more

Book Review - The Price of Being Fair

Image
Overview  As the FairPrice group in Singapore completes 50 years, "The Price of Being Fair" book is a timely story of it's birth and evolution. The book has been authored by Sue-Ann Chia and Shing Huei Peh. While being true to history, the book has nuggets of "behind the scenes" information, given the time the authors have spent with various leaders at FairPrice. The book is already a best seller according to Kinokuniya book store. At under 200 pages, it makes for a breezy read. The Usual Suspects Having worked in retail industry for over two decades, the travails of  NTUC FairPrice seem familiar to me. A retail CEO once remarked that retail is a pretty "public" industry. There is not much behind which a retail business can hide. As such, retailers often have to follow the aspirations and concerns of the communities and customers they serve. The journey of FairPrice from being an EDLP (everyday low price) retailer to one having multiple formats, busin...
Read more

How to create a big picture

Image
Typically, you need wide view or fisheye lenses to capture a panoramic picture. An alternate method (though may not give the same quality) is to use software to create a panoramic image. There are several software available which you can use to create a panoramic image. The concept is called - "stitching". Some of the software available are - PTGui, Panavue, PAX-it, AutoStitch and so on. I sometimes use AutoStitch to create the panoramas since I have a 50mm lens for now. Each of these software vary in price and features. The added advantage is that you can take the pictures using any kind of camera - digital, phone or SLR. Steps: 1. Visualize the picture you want to take. 2. Use your camera and "divide" your image into rows and columns. An example being - 2 rows and 5 columns. 3. Take 10 pictures to cover your entire image. 4. Use any of the software to "stitch" them together. Here is an example of a panorama created using AutoStitch. I to...
Read more