Well, there goes my allowance money. Personal data search engine CloudMagic is today making good on its promises to never sell user data in order to generate revenue. Instead, it’s launching a premium, paid account tier providing access to unlimited previews of your search results. Also new today is support for additional online accounts, most notably Yahoo email and Hotmail.
CloudMagic, for those unfamiliar, lets you ‘google’ your personal data including emails, contacts, Twitter and Facebook posts, online files on Dropbox, Box, Evernote, Google Drive, IMs, and more.
The service, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, became one of my own most-used apps last year, primarily on mobile. This was mainly due to the fact that it’s a better way to search through overcrowded inboxes and contact lists than the poor search functionality built into the iPhone’s native apps. (And it’s still much faster than using Gmail’s app for searching, too).
Starting today, all current users will receive access to the “CloudMagic Pro” plan for free for the first three months. When it expires, they will then be given the choice to upgrade or return to a free account (includes 50 previews/month). Pricing is either $4.99 per month, or $49.99 per year. The previews referenced in the Pro account are the search result snapshots CloudMagic returns. You can click on them (or tap on them on mobile) to perform common actions, like replying to an email, retweeting a Twitter post, or opening a document, for example.
The company previously supported a wide range of online services, but with today’s update, it’s expanding to include Microsoft’s online storage site, SkyDrive, as well as Yahoo email and Microsoft email – the latter however you may know it: Hotmail, MSN, Windows Live Mail, or most recently, Outlook.com.
Other Microsoft users, on the corporate side, will also be glad to know that CloudMagic is today rolling out complete Exchange ActiveSync support. CEO Rohit Nadhani tells us that technically, the service supported Exchange before, but it had been using the EWS protocol to do so, and not all Exchange servers support EWS. He says that by adding ActiveSync, which is preferred on mobile, CloudMagic can now index 100 percent of Microsoft Exchange email inboxes.