An Israeli teenager, Daniel Gross, is behind one of the more interesting entrants in the search engine field in recent times. He and co-founder Robby Walker launched Greplin last month in California's Bay Area, and have quickly raised around $5 million in investment capital.
The site allows you to plug in your various social networks -- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn -- and Google's Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar, plus your info from DropBox and Yammer. Greplin indexes all the information in your various networks and makes them all searchable. You can search for people, or events, or streams, or files. (It would be great if it connected with Yahoo and Flickr, too.)
With all of us now storing more information in the cloud -- from interactions with friends and coworkers to photos, events and documents -- it makes you wonder why a search service that helps you find needles in your social haystacks didn't come along sooner.
Greplin's startup story has been written up in:
* Inc.
* Geek.com