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A comment on Greplin’s (YC W10) Social Search Opens Its Doors To All. Parent comment

Re:Greplin’s (YC W10) Social Search Opens Its Doors To All by lrm242 on Wednesday February 16, 2011 @03:06PM (#2228022)
Do you store full copies of all data? What I mean is, if someone breaks into Greplin, can they effectively read all of my email assuming I've synced with Gmail? Or do you just index the data and reference sources using URLs?
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Re:Greplin’s (YC W10) Social Search Opens Its Doors To All by gst on Wednesday February 16, 2011 @03:31PM (#2228139)
Even if they just have an index without the full copy it's not that hard to reconstruct a version similar to the original just from the index, as in an inverted index you typically do not only store the documents of a term, but also the word number within the document. However, it's not possible to restore the original version exactly, due to things like stemmers.
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Re:Greplin’s (YC W10) Social Search Opens Its Doors To All by sfphotoarts on Wednesday February 16, 2011 @06:54PM (#2228942)
often in text indexing the original document is kept for things like snippet generation.
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