Gmail Label and Yahoo Mail Support

Two new updates to announce!

Filter Greplin Searches by Gmail Label  
Now you can search your Gmail labels using Greplin. If you're not a compulsive Gmail message labeler, then this may seem small. But to the many of you who emailed us, labels were of the utmost importance. They were a critical part of the email experience. Now Greplin lets you narrow your searches by Gmail label so you can quickly get to what you need most.

Add "label:family" or "label:yourlabelhere" into your next search and see what comes up.

New Yahoo Mail Support 
We're adding support for Yahoo Mail. We've been taking requests here and via email for over a year now and Yahoo mail has been at the top of the list the entire time.  
Link your Yahoo Mail account to Greplin and you'll never be without your mail again.  

 

Design Challenge Winner

A few months ago we announced the Greplin Design Challenge. The goal of the challenge was to re-think the way we find information on Wikipedia.  We reviewed many great submissions and appreciate the time that people put into their creations.  

After a few months of deliberation, we're happy to announce our winner: Aloke Pillai, a 19 year old designer from Canada.

We were impressed by Aloke's well thought-out design process which lead to a simple and unique mobile interface. Most importantly, we were excited because he dreamed up an entirely new social mechanic for search: "Wikimarks." 

With each search of Wikipedia, users create a wealth of information: the results we choose to read, the specific paragraphs we find interesting, and the images we discover are only a few examples. But once the tab is closed, all of that information is lost. Aloke's Wikimarks would allow users to store, share and curate searches - a modern version of SparkNotes for the world's largest encyclopedia.

Announcing the winner has taken longer than it should and we apologize for that. Managing our growth and finding time in our judges' busy schedules delayed announcing the winner. After consulting with Aloke, he preferred a cash prize instead of the billboard.

We're happy to report that Aloke made it to Edward Tufte's talk last December and we look forward to seeing more of his work.  

And we'd like to extend a belated thank you to everyone who submitted their imaginative and innovative designs. Each entry painted an exciting picture of the future of how we could manage our information online. 
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Greplin Now Indexes Google Chats!

We're sneaking out another new feature just before the new year: support for Gmail Chats.

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Now you can search for your chats the same way you search for a Gmail Message. You'll see results mixed in with the "Messages" results. 

This won't happen automatically. To enable this feature you must make sure "Show in IMAP" is enabled for Chats in your Gmail settings. Here are the steps to start getting your Gmail chats indexed on Greplin: 

- Login to Gmail

- Click the Gmail gear icon in the upper right corner

- Click "Mail Settings"

- Select the "Labels" Tab

- Next to "Chats" click "Show in IMAP"

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Your Google Chats should begin showing up in your Greplin searches within 24 hours!

Let us know if you encounter any hiccups. 

 

 

iPhone App Design

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MatthaeusAaronDavid and the whole Greplin team have done some major work on the iPhone App design. We hope these changes make it even easier to find what you're looking for as quickly as possible. 

First, you'll notice that search results are a little more organized and easy to scan:

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Then if you drill down to one of your items, say a calendar event, you'll see a whole new organization of your data. The name of the event, start/end time, creator and neccesary details:

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If you tap an email result, you'll see a whole new layout, with Greplin Highlights in blue. We extract the important phone numbers and email addresses so they're just one tap away. 

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And while you're at it, don't forget to enable your iPhone Contacts. This means that all the contacts in your iPhone will become searchable on Greplin. Just go to "Settings" and switch "iPhone Contacts" to "ON". 

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We've been so busy cranking out these new features and design changes that we've had to choose where we spend our time and energy. We've decided to sunset (for now) one of our earlier projects that has been very time-consuming to maintain, the Gmail Search Extension. Starting now, you'll no longer see the little cloud inside your Gmail search bar. This will allow us to spend all our time and energy on improving the Greplin search experience. 

So while you're busy eating and drinking this holiday season, take a second to add those iPhone contacts, update your Greplin App, and tell us what you think! 

(And if you haven't downloaded the Greplin App... do it now!)

Greplin Google Apps Update

Greplin users love the simplicity that comes from making information searchable in a single place - we constantly get messages with suggestions for new account types that should be included. We get so many requests that we added a poll here to collect feedback:

http://help.greplin.com/customer/portal/articles/215227

But those messages are nothing compared to the amount of feedback we have received about Google Apps accounts being Premium. Many of you are using Google Apps for your personal email account and aren't a business customer.  Many users with Google Apps Mail accounts are university students.  On top of that, a number of users found the difference between a Gmail account and Google Apps account to be confusing.

Our primary goal is to make Greplin accessible to as many people as possible. So in response to this feedback, we're implementing this change immediately. Google Apps Mail, Docs, Calendar and Contacts are now part of the basic Greplin Free package.

Here's the full list of accounts you can now link to Greplin for free:

  • Gmail
  • Google Docs
  • Google Calendar
  • Google Contacts
  • Google Apps Mail
  • Google Apps Docs
  • Google Apps Calendar
  • Google Apps Contacts
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Dropbox
  • LinkedIn

Premium users can link all of the above, plus:

  • Evernote
  • Yammer
  • Salesforce
  • Basecamp
  • Highrise
  • Campfire
  • Google Reader
  • Delicious
  • Pinboard
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

We hope this means that even more people can make their life instantly organized with Greplin. Please let us know if you've got any comments/questions/concerns. We love to hear them!

P.S. If the only premium indexes you have linked to Greplin are Google Apps accounts you will be downgraded to a Free account automatically and will no longer be charged.  Yearly members will also receive a refund for the remainder of the year.  If you upgraded via iPhone, you'll need to cancel your subscription manually. Instructions are available here: http://help.greplin.com/customer/portal/articles/197742

 

 

Matthaeus and Pratik

Have you noticed Greplin looking a little nicer lately? More modern? Maybe even... glamorous?

This is because, after a year of searching, we have finally found Greplin's first designer: Matthaeus Krenn. 

Matthaeus began his studies as an Industrial Designer in Austria, but quickly turned his clean and minimal design aesthetic into a degree in Interaction Design and Technology. He's worked for IDEO, frog design and even Microsoft. He loves cheese pizza, sachertorte, and schooling us in Unreal Tournament. He's been here 2 months you'll see more and more of his new designs across our website and iPhone app soon. And check out the awesome t-shirt he designed for our 2nd all night hackathon. That's him on the left with his arms crossed looking very cranky we haven't eaten the cake yet.

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Matthaeus isn't our only new hire this quarter. Also joining the team is recent grad Pratik Tandel. In the last year he's interned at Facebook making your friend's photos load faster, completed his B.E. in Computer Engineering and done a cross continent move from Mumbai to SF. He's a bit shy, but he's slowly warming up to our office dogs, Eva and Ada. We even managed to convince him to join us for a misfit Thanksgiving dinner, although he did admit it wasn't spicy enough. Pratik is now writing code to index a new service. We'll announce that soon, but for now we can assure you it'll fulfill a big user request! Here you can see his why-are-you-taking-my-picture face"

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Matthaeus and Pratik bring our total number of employees up to 12! But we're still looking to hire at least 2 more people. Check out the job openings on our recently redesigned jobs page (thanks Matthaeus!).

 

New Language Search Features!

Multilingual Greplin users rejoice! We've added 2 new language-specific search features!

First, we've added the ability to narrow your Greplin searches by language. Just add "language:__" to any query. 

Looking for only French emails from Stefan? Search "stefan lang:fr"

Or maybe you'd prefer to remove all the German language results? Try "mike -lang:de", and you'll get everything except German documents. 

We're supporting over 40 language codes (including fi, he, hi, id, sv, vi and more). Here's the full list of supported language codes.

This is a new feature for us, so there still may be a few quirks. It's much harder to identify the correct language of small documents, like tweets and Facebook statuses, so you may see some incorrect results for smaller items. Results may also differ when an email or message contains multiple languages.

Our second new language feature is "accent-and-character folding". This is somewhat similar to transliteration, meaning that words with accents that aren't present on standard North American keyboards will be searchable with or without the accent. Here are some examples:

groß -> gross

Stjørdal -> Stjordal

fête -> fete

This works in reverse as well. A search for 'fete' will also return results with 'fête'.

We hope these new Greplin features make it even easier to get what you need quickly. Please send us any and all feedback as you test out our new features!

 

Dropbox: In-File Searching

When you add a Dropbox service to Greplin, you'll be able to search through more than just the title and file name. Now, the entire text content of pdfs, docs and spreadsheets are completely indexed and searchable.

New Greplin users will see this feature automatically.

If you signed up for Greplin before October 2011, we're rolling out this functionality to you over the next few weeks.

If you just can't wait, you can start searching within Dropbox now by following by removing and re-adding your Dropbox data source. You can do so by going to greplin.com/settings#indexes. Click on your old Dropbox service, then hit "delete this index". Now re-add your Dropbox service and you can search within files as soon as your index is complete.   

Let us know what you think of this new feature by emailing support@greplin.com

Happy In-File Searching!

 

DBloom & JS Exception Catcher

We're excited to announce the newest hacker to join our team: xoogler David Bloom.

David is our 2nd Iowan, 7th engineer and only Opera devoteethat we wrestled him away from Google. And now we're busy trying to convince him to like indian food and he's trying to convince us to convert to Opera. Let's see who cracks first. In his spare time David collects copious Facebook bounties and mops the floor with us in Unreal Tournament.

We assume that he's practicing for Unreal Tournament in this picture:
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He recently wrote some great stuff which we're open sourcing today that solves a major pain point for all web developers: a global javascript exception handler.

Internally, we use our Greplin-Exception-Catcher to analyze all incoming system errors. Until now, there hasn't been a cross-browser method of getting clean stack-traces for Javascript exceptions. David quickly whipped up this Greplin-js-exception-handler, so we can quickly tell if a user encounters a client-side error on our site. (And yes, it works in Opera).

 

Greplin iPhone App

It's been our biggest request for months and it's finally here! If you've already registered for Greplin, just download the app and login. Or, new users can create an account through the App. It's specifically designed for searching on the go. 

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We want the Greplin iPhone app to minimize the things that typically make the mobile experience painful:

- Typing 

- Scanning 

- Waiting

And here's how we think we've done it:

After logging into the app, you'll automatically see Suggested Searches which are pulled from your calendar events and recently searched terms. (Facebook and email events coming soon) This should lead to less typing and more clicking. 

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We've also added Greplin Highlights. Once you find the email/event/tweet/file you were looking for, open it up and you'll see all your important information is automatically pulled out at the top of the result. Now you can identify crucial information like phone numbers and addresses at a glance. 

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Oh and we've done everything humanly possible to make it fast. Really fast. We download only the information you need, so you can quickly get what you want. Most of the time, you don't even have to leave the App to get it.

So download it now and save huge amounts of time later. Let us know if we've hit the mark. Does the Greplin App make searching on-the-go easier?