Daniel Gross’s Greplin Is One Smart Search Engine

A few years ago, Daniel Gross was on his way to a party in his native Israel when he pulled out his smartphone to look up the address. The invitation could have been buried in his e-mail, on Facebook, or within some other app. The prolonged phone fumbling that followed led him to an idea: What if there were a simple way to search it all? “I’m putting more and more stuff online,” says Gross, 20. “There should be a product that can just give me one search box for it.”

Greplin, the company Gross co-founded last year after moving to San Francisco, aims to fill this void. Users can plug in their credentials for Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a host of other popular Web services, and create a search engine capable of sifting through all manner of personal documents, contacts, and calendar items. It’s like Google for your private life. “What Google has is a really, really big book with a really big index,” says Robby Walker, 27, who left a job at the search giant to co-found Greplin with Gross. “What we have is this massive library full of books, each of which is only accessible by one person.”