• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 4, 2016

Atlas Informatics has built and released a search engine that reaches across social, email, and apps on devices from phones to computers to find content in attachments, files or folders.

Take the old option of being able to search for keywords in files on a Windows device and multiply that experience by 1,001%. The engine, Atlas Recall, indexes and makes all content searchable on a computer or mobile device from content stored in Gmail, Facebook or content seen on the Web.

Atlas Informatics CEO Jordan Ritter, formally of Napster, told TechCrunch there are two types of search engines. "The house of search is actually two houses," Ritter said. "One is, find me something I’ve never seen. The other is, find me something I definitely know I’ve seen."

Microsoft, Nathan Myhrvold, and Aspect Ventures invested $20.7 million for Ritter and team to pursue this dream, per one report.

That dream includes privacy standards. It works if you don't mind all your data and digital footprint living on a server somewhere.

All the data gets encrypted as it moves from the application to the Atlas cloud, where it remain encrypted. Ah, but the user is in control of his/her own data, according to the company.

Metadata helps the search engine keep track of the content and context and the surrounding information. It knows when you looked at them, in the order viewed, what other windows and apps were open at the same time, from what machine or device, and if it was shared and with whom.

Since Atlas Recall automatically remembers everything the user sees across all of their devices, the data is used to build a searchable history to help recall content seen. That includes private data, such as bank account information or medical records. Websites, email, apps. So the company built privacy features into the platform that allows the user to choose to exclude specific content that it says will never be recorded by the system.