Google Reader – Where’s the Search box?

Funny observation from Eric Nagel — Google, the company whose name basically means search, doesn’t even have a search box on their Google Reader page. It’d be nice to search for specific keywords in my feeds — or search for something I read 2 weeks ago.

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  • Adam

    AMEN!

  • http://www.fansoftech.com Jason

    I’ve often wondered this myself and I got to a point one day where I tried to find a Greasemonkey script or SOMETHING that could provide this functionality. Well, there’s a dirty little workaround available: http://something.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/search-your-rss-feeds/. Basically, you create a custom search at Google Co-Op, import your OPML list of feeds (which you can export in Reader settings) and, voila!, you’ve got your Google Reader search. Unfortunately, you’ll need to update your Co-Op search listing as you continue to add more feeds to Reader. However, I anticipate a built-in search for Reader isn’t too far away.

  • http://marshallk.com Marshall Kirkpatrick

    In order to search for something from two weeks ago items not presently in the feed would have to be cached somewhere. That’s easier to do with a desktop reader like NetNewswire or whatever that Windows equiv is – but maybe caching everything wouldn’t be undoable for Google Reader too. I wonder if this isn’t why they don’t offer search right now.

  • http://www.mindgrids.com Tom Sieron

    I don’t think it’s a problem, especially for Google (btw: don’t the have like the whole web cached somewhere?). Bloglines is also an online reader and it lets you search through your feeds and the feeds of all other ppl on Bloglines. The search mechanism isn’t top notch but it works most of the time.

  • http://maique.wordpress.com/ maique

    i would love to have this implemented and never quite understood why things are like this.
    i made the change from bloglines and never looked back, but this would be a great feature for google reader.

  • Piers

    The easiest way of doing this is to use google coop. Create a new search engine, import your OPML file into is and voila! It will search through all the posts from those sites… which is effectively searching through all the feeds in Google Reader.

  • MSwanberg

    Or even better, a new RSS feed that’s a search on a compilation of your chosen feeds. So like, you could use a search term, say “iPod”, and the feeder would show a live-updating feed of entries from your other feeds that contain the word “iPod”.

  • http://www.100cute.com Julia STott

    I think it is shame for a big Company like GOOOOOOOOOOOOGLE

  • http://www.frontrowcrew.com Apreche

    Personally, as a heavy Google Reader user, I have no need for a Google Reader search box. As Google Reader eliminates all items which I have read, there is very little for me to search for within the reader. I tend to use del.icio.us or digg to remember any items I plan on revisiting. Unless Google Reader starts archiving every item from all of my feeds which I mark as read, a search box is useless.

  • John Solo

    Heck I would like to see my starred or shared items sorted into the sites of origin much like the way you read them!

  • focsa

    agree!

  • chrism

    While I admit that it’s a little odd to not have the search box in Reader, I’ve never found it to be a problem. Just use the Google toolbar.

  • http://www.netnagel.com/ Eric Nagel

    I’ll go further & explain why I think this is needed (other than because they’re Google).

    Google Reader allows me to quickly skim through & read numerous feeds. Most of the time, I only read the headline. Sometimes, I’ll read the snippet. Rarely, I’ll click & read the whole page.

    I was chatting w/ a friend the other day and needed to find something I remember seeing in Google Reader. Luckily, I knew the source so I went to that feed, selected “all items” and started scrolling. This particular feed has about 20 items per day, and what I was looking for was about 2 weeks old. Sometime later, I found the story, and was able to share the link.

    Now since I knew so much about what I was looking for, if I had a search box, I wouldn’t have to scroll through nearly 280 items to find the link.

    I suppose I could have went to the source site and used their search engine (assuming they have one), but I’ll go back to the obvious: this is GOOGLE! With search everywhere else, why not here?

  • http://zeno.davaz.com Zeno Davatz

    yeah friggin yeah friggin yeah! Where is the friggin Search Box in reader.google.com. They should stop buying companies and instead improve there core stuff more!

    concerning search:

    The thing I do not like about the common search engines is, that they do not recognize documents with similar content. It happens often on the Web that a post or document is spread out over more then 50 websites. Now that is great for the author but not for the searcher because it blows up your search result unnecessarily. With InfoCodex this will not happen because the linguistical database recognizes similar documents and puts them into groups. This does not blow up your search result unnecessarily.

    http://www.ywesee.com/pmwiki.php/Ywesee/InfoCodexProcedure

    Three things a modern Search engine should do:

    1. Automatically classify a document according to its content.
    2. Automatically generate an abstract of a document.
    3. Generate a Heat-Map of the Contents of a Search Result.

    http://www.ywesee.com/uploads/Main/InfoCodex_22.2.2007.pdf

  • lev polvoi

    well i guess we can now define irony using google.

  • Michael Savoy

    Where’s my Google Reader Search box?
    Right there at the top of my Google Reader page. You just have to do a little work to get it there.
    Download the Firefox Greasemonkey extension that allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. …
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

    Then install the greasemonkey script that places the search bar for Google Reader at the top of the page
    Google Reader Search box
    http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/6912

  • mikojak

    true, I also noticed that you cannot delete a category, unless I’m missing something.

  • http://networkeffect.org Derek

    I also don’t appreciate the fact that you can’t rename labels. Currently, you have to create the new label, assign your feeds to it, and then delete the other label, which strangely is referred as a “tag” in the subscription management area.

    These are all kinks that Google has heard about and will address with a new iteration. Just be thankful for the fact that it is already the best reader out there.

  • http://www.100cute.com Julia STott

    Assuming that Human is err !! we think its just error which can happen from any1

    No doubt such erros from a multi billion company is something to worry about.