I fired up Google Reader this morning and to my surprise I found a search box:
This is one of the last missing features I wanted Google Reader to have.
I actually have a friend that didn’t want to switch from a desktop feed reader until Google Reader added search. Now he can safely move to it :-)
You can limit your search to all items in all of your feeds, all stared items, all shared items or items from a specific folder. I couldn’t make the search work with some of the search keywords I’m familiar with in Gmail like “from:XXX”, “label:XXX” etc, which I think is very important.
I even used the Google Blog Search syntax of “inpostauthor:Eran” to find all posts written by Eran, but it doesn’t seem to work.
I would have expected that the Google Reader search will use the Google Blog Search engine underneath and just add additional limitation for searches like “All shared items” in which it will perform the search only on that specific set of items. Perhaps it does use it but without some of the query syntax features.
Oh well, I hope the Google Reader search will converge with the syntax of Google Blog Search to make the search feature complete.
All in all this is a great and long requested feature. Great job Google Reader team!