I have personal notes, correspondence, code and documentation from nearly 20 years of work. These are spread across multiple (cloud) services, and searching across these fiefdoms has been impractical.

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.