#Google Reader

Back in the Web 2.0 days, RSS and Atom feeds promised a better way to consume content. No more jumping between websites just to catch up on what’s new. You could open a single feed reader and get everything in one clean stream. It felt like the web finally worked for you instead of the other way around.

As the ecosystem grew, new tools appeared around it. One of the biggest was FeedBurner, which Google later acquired. It helped publishers track subscribers, manage feeds, and even monetize them by inserting ads directly into the feed. It was an early version of what we now call native advertising - ads that blended right in with regular content.

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.