Ask HN: How can you search your personal data?
The problem goes like: "Ah, I remember having a conversation with someone about [algorithm], then recording an important insight. Let's find that."
This isn't a problem solved by an LLM. The blocker is that there isn't a way to run search code on all this plain text.
Services:
* Email (gmail, synced to my macOS disk with Apple Mail)
* Dropbox
* Notion
* Google Drive
* Obsidian
* Github
* Apple Notes
* Discord chats
* Trello
* My own blog
If I had everything synced to my mac's disk, maybe I could do a plaintext search there. However Spotlight's indexing is always incomplete and misses obvious files. My Dropbox is so large I don't sync it all locally.
Some services I no longer use, like Evernote. When I archived this service, I exported everything and moved it into my Dropbox. So, if I search Dropbox, it also searches old notes from Evernote. There's no way I could be doing this for all services I actively use.
The way I search now is I guess the service the result is most likely in, and search there. When finding no results, I search the next most likely service, ad nauseum For my own blog, I used to use Google's site search, but I recently discovered this was incomplete: https://bsky.app/profile/dustinfreeman.bsky.social/post/3m5l5tto6pk27
I could imagine a solution where there's some 3rd party service that has access keys to all my services. But, let's be real, that's a huge amount of trust. Also, my access to all these services is 2FA'd with expiry, and so I'd be continually re-upping auth to this third party service. At that point, it makes sense to just do search how I do it now.