Developing anything for Internet Explorer is definitely arduous! All sorts of limitations and speed bumps pave the way for any developer writing code for IE. Many even recommend to say no to IE development. Well, it’s a tough NO considering the fact that more than one third of the internet population is still on IE.

We went ahead anyway and are happy to announce the availability of CloudMagic extension for Internet Explorer. When you add the extension, a floating search box appears in all webpages. It’s right there when you need it the most. The keyboard shortcut and context menu further helps save time.

With this addition, the CloudMagic in-page search box now supports 95% of the desktop web browsers. Enjoy the awesomeness.

Download links:

CloudMagic Extension for Internet Explorer [To get CloudMagic search box]
CloudMagic Accelerator for Internet Explorer [To get CloudMagic in the browser context menu]

Requires Internet Explorer 7 or above.

Cheers,
Team CloudMagic

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What is personal data?

Someone rightly pointed out that personal data online is the other half of the web. Websites are one half, and your data stored in various cloud based services is the other half. All your email, files, contacts, social network data, photos etc. constitute your personal data.

Why is personal data search important?

a) You spend more time looking in your personal data than in public data

This is the data that you look for most often – that important email you received from your boss, the quote that Oprah tweeted, the video that your roomie shared on Facebook, your resume, the designer boots that you had pinned on Pinterest etc.

b) Your data is scattered

As you sign up to more and more services – social networking (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), repositories (Dropbox, Box), utilities (Salesforce.com, Sharepoint, Evernote) – you generate more and more data and your data continues to scatter further. This dramatically increases the need to have a mechanism to search across your personal data.

Let’s take a simple example of all your contacts – Your contacts are in your email address book, your LinkedIn account and your Facebook account. Now if you need to find one specific contact, you need to get into each contact list and carry out a search. A personal data search engine lets you find a specific contact across all your contact lists.

c) Native search functionality leaves us wanting for more

While online services are concentrating on providing a great platform for users to create data, they tend to ignore providing a great search on the data that is created. For eg. Twitter – you cannot search beyond 10 days, you cannot search in your own tweets, you cannot search in your follower’s tweets, you cannot even search in your own direct messages and favourites. The same goes for Facebook, while your news feed and wall are the most important elements of your account, you cannot reliably search on them.

Will existing search engines evolve to include personal data?

It would be very tough (read impossible) for existing search engines to include personal data into their realm of search. While it might have its own set of technology challenges, that’s not what will hold them back.

a) They will stop each other

Historical proof – Twitter denied Google access to its firehose. If users are able to find tweets on searching in Google, the search queries on Twitter.com will reduce. Therefore, ad revenue on Twitter search will decrease. Similarly, Facebook would not expose its data to Google. Remember how Google responded to Facebook? They will continue to fight.

b) They will be their own enemies in this case

If Google wished to include personal data into search results, they would essentially be making it easier for users to access Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Microsoft Exchange etc. all of whom are competitors to Google in one way or another. This will this piss off a lot of people at Google for sure.

c) They will be biased

Google tried to include personal data in their search results – Search Plus Your World. What did they do? They started giving priority to the data from their assets. Twitter slammed Google for prioritizing results from Google+. Would Google treat Facebook, Exchange and Dropbox data with equal importance as Google+ data?

Finally…

There are a handful of startups who have built solutions to address this problem, ours being one of them – CloudMagic. We’ve been working on this for more than 2 years, and have never felt more strongly about the gaping need for a personal data search service.

Cheers,
Team CloudMagic

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Amazon’s Kindle Fire is a great tablet device. Powerful, great content from Amazon, yet very well priced. We see the presence of the Kindle Fire in meeting rooms, living rooms and even office desks. However, the ability to have access all your data (emails, calendar events, contacts, tweets) on your Kindle Fire is quite a task. Either you need to download various apps to sync/download your data or you need to login to numerous cloud services and keep various tabs open all the time.

With CloudMagic’s Kindle Fire app, you no longer need to fret about accessing all your data. Simply install CloudMagic, link the services you want access to and use CloudMagic’s super-fast search to instantly find that email you were looking for, that contact info you needed or that tweet you want to read.

What’s more, with our recent support for Exchange, you can now have your work email as well as your personal Gmail searchable together. So go ahead, find anything in a second from your Kindle Fire. Click here to download the app.

We would love to have your feedback on CloudMagic Kindle Fire app. For frequent updates on CloudMagic, please follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.

Cheers,
Team CloudMagic

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Hi,

We are delighted to announce two big updates today:

• Support for Microsoft Exchange, and
• Support for Google Chat

Support for Microsoft Exchange
Why Exchange? Most work email is on Microsoft Exchange, and looking for an email using Outlook or your smartphone sucks big time. We guess every iPhone+Exchange user on this planet has been a victim of “Continue search on the server?” message (which still fails to fetch search results most of the time). CloudMagic eradicates this problem by introducing support for Exchange emails.

As always, with CloudMagic you’ll find what you are looking for in under a second! So stop remembering where ‘that’ email is and don’t worry if John’s phone number is in your GMail address book or Exchange address book, let CloudMagic find it for you.

Note to Office 365 users – You can also add your Office 365 account to CloudMagic and search through the emails, events, contacts and much more.

Support for Google Chat
Almost all Gmail users use Google Chat and we got a lot of requests to make chat conversations searchable through CloudMagic. Now you can search through all your chats using CloudMagic! If you have already added a Gmail account to Cloudmagic, follow these steps and you will start seeing search results from your chat conversations.

You can also login to your CloudMagic account and go to the “Add Services” page to add these newly supported services.

We are excited about this release and we would love to have your feedback. For frequent updates, you should follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.

Cheers,
Team CloudMagic

Comments(10)

Although you can use our service at CloudMagic.com, nothing can match the ease at which you can access your data when you add the CloudMagic extension to your browser. When you add the extension, a floating search bar appears in Gmail and Twitter pages. It’s right there when you need it the most. Keyboard shortcut and context menu further helps save time.

Today, we are happy to announce the availability of CloudMagic Extension for Safari. Download it here.

To conclude, thank you all for overwhelming response for the last release. We are always asked if we are adding Facebook, Evernote, Dropbox, Tumblr, etc. to CloudMagic. We assure you again that all those requested services and many more are in our wishlist. We will keep you posted on their availability. For frequent updates please follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook.

Cheers,
Team CloudMagic

Comments(5)

A while ago we set out to solve the elusive search problem with personal online data. We asked ourselves a very simple question – why can’t we search our personal data on different services, with the same ease and speed of Spotlight? That’s when we introduced CloudMagic. In that pursuit, we continued development on CloudMagic – we added more services, we improved the search speed, we added a whole bunch of features, etc. etc. Everyone loved it. James Fallows from The Atlantic went on to say – “If you’re using Gmail, and not using CloudMagic, you’re shortening your effective lifespan, plus sapping the economy, by wasting your precious time.”

Bravo, now what!

“Searching on mobile sucks, is there something like CloudMagic for mobile?” We get that a lot. We ourselves missed CloudMagic while on the move and started working on CloudMagic for mobile.

We’re really excited today to launch CloudMagic’s blazing fast search across mobile devices. Now you can find anything in just a second from your smartphone. Embedded below is a quick intro video.

We have worked very hard to deliver search results under one second, we hope you enjoy the speed. Please give it a spin and let us know your feedback.

CloudMagic for Mobile – iPhone App Store, Android Market
CloudMagic for Desktop – Chrome Web Store, Firefox Add-ons

Cheers,
Team CloudMagic

Comments(14)

Everyone has their stories of how helpful CloudMagic’s search for Gmail, Google Apps and Twitter has been. In this post, I’m summarizing how to get the most out of it, from my own experience and inputs from numerous users.

1. Search as you think, and don’t think too much

Don’t be shy to search for a phrase, partial address or an area code of telephone number that you know exists in what you are looking for. CloudMagic will instantly search through all parts of your Google Apps / Gmail (from, to, subject, body etc.). For example – I was looking for my hotel reservation email and the first thing that came to mind was the price of the room. So I search for ’319′and there I see my reservation details. Another example – I’m not good at remembering names of the people that I’ve met just once, but I recollect the company they work for and that’s what I search. You can also use advanced search operators (from:, to:, filename: etc.) to separate wheat from the chaff.

2. Add multiple accounts and services

Add all your Google Apps / Gmail / Twitter accounts, so that you can quickly search through all your content in one go. You’ll no longer have to remember where Charlie’s video was shared and you’d be surprised how the accounts you seldom use have very valuable information in them, which CloudMagic will pop up for you. (You can always choose to display search results across all accounts by going to Preferences > Enable Combined Search)

3. Use the various access interfaces CloudMagic gives you

You can search in various ways using CloudMagic. You should pick the one that suits you most based on what you search :

a. Search bar inside Gmail.com/Google Apps mail or Twitter.com – the most popular access method

b. Full page search – comes in handy when you need larger previews and less clutter

c. Chrome’s Omnibox – no matter what page you are browsing, type C, space in the address bar and start searching in CloudMagic. The results will start appearing in suggestions section of Omnibox. Keyboard shortcut fans love this.

d. Chrome’s Browser Options – similar to Omnibox, you can use this no matter which page you’re on.

e. Browser context menu – the good old right click thing

4. Place the CloudMagic search box right

The CloudMagic search box can be moved around, by simply dragging it. The default spot is most convenient for me, but if you want to move it to a better spot, you should. You could also simply replace your Gmail search box by clicking on “Replace Gmail Search” in the CloudMagic search box drop down menu.

5. Note to Firefox users

We are always building more into CloudMagic. Unlike Chrome, Firefox does not automatically update the add-ons. However, it will prompt you when there is an update. If updates are not prompted automatically, look for “Automatically check for updates” option in Firefox Tools> Advanced> Update.

I hope these tips will help you enjoy CloudMagic even more. Tell us if you have more tips, we would love to hear from you.

We are very thankful for the overwhelming response since we launched. This comment sums up the kind of feedback that we’ve received:“If you’re using Gmail, and not using CloudMagic, you’re shortening your effective lifespan, plus sapping the economy, by wasting your precious time.” – James Fallows, The Atlantic.

You can follow us on Twitter or Facebook to stay updated

Cheers,
Rishit

Comments(3)

Twitter search sucks

You know it. Lets jot down why?

• It’s slow
• It can only search for tweets sent in the past 10 days
• It cannot search for direct messages
• It’s not easy to search for tweets in your timeline
• It’s not search-as-you-type like Google Instant (I know this is too much to ask for when the search itself is rudimentary)

CloudMagic is an answer for all this. Today, CloudMagic extends its search speed & simplicity to Twitter. Although CloudMagic cannot solve Twitter search as a whole, it helps you search for all your tweets/retweets, direct messages & tweets in your timeline – all of this search-as-you-type. Needless to say you can search for your tweets even when you are offline. Twitter is the first non Google service that CloudMagic is indexing & below is the consolidated list of all supported services:

• Gmail
• Google Apps Email
• Google Docs
• Google Apps Docs
• Google Calendar
• Google Apps Calendar
• Google Contacts
• Google Apps Contacts, and
• Twitter

Yes, one search bar & you can search across all these services instantly!

Up to 100 times faster search results

CloudMagic is known for speed. It is already fast. Well, that doesn’t stop us from making it faster. Our internal tests have shown that the current release serves search results up to 100 times faster than before. Thanks to those optimizations under the hood. We believe that every collective second you save adds up to the overall search experience.

Easy & fast access to data = less frustration = more productivity!

We are excited about this release & would love to have your feedback. On a closing note, what other services would you like on CloudMagic?

Cheers,
Chirag
Team CloudMagic

PS: As new changes need reindexing of your data, the search results may not appear immediately after update.

Comments(5)

Hi,

This is a bug fix release. CloudMagic prompted the intro video for existing users. What’s the point in introducing CloudMagic to someone who is already using it? Oops, we apologize for that! Click here to download the release with the bug fix.

Cheers,
Team CloudMagic

Comments(0)

Hi,

This is a bug fix release. CloudMagic didn’t work for some Firefox users as the index got corrupted. In this release we have made some architectural changes to fix this issues. Download the latest release from here.

Cheers,
Team CloudMagic

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