Google Reader Can’t Search?

Posted on March 21, 2007 by Michael Schurter

Google is a search and ad company, so I would expect all of their products to contain at least one of those two things!

Thanks to their AJAX page loading I can’t even use my browser’s built-in page search.

I’m really enjoying Google Reader for the most part.  The real killer feature I’m looking for in a feed reader is some intelligent Planet handling.

There are 2 ways of reading Planets, each with its own cons:

Subscribe to Planet Feed

  • Duplicate posts from people who are in multiple planets.
  • At the mercy of the Planet aggregator’s RSS mangling.  (Planet posts often differ slightly from the regular RSS post.)
  • Unable to pick and choose which feeds to subscribe too in the Planet.

Subscribe to Feeds via Planet’s OPML

  • If OPML changes, my feed list doesn’t.
  • Hard to organize (Google Reader doesn’t seem to automatically remove duplicates.).

OPML would be the obvious choice is you could somehow subscribe to an OPML feed.  That way I could remove prune boring blogs from Planets and allow my feed list to be automatically updated when the Planet is.

Any suggestions or am I just way too picky? ;)

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  • http://dancoulter.com Dan Coulter

    Stop living in the past! Who needs search?

    Seriously, though, it is weird that there is no search in Google Reader. You can Google for the feature and find some absurdly elaborate fixes for that issue if you care enough.

  • http://www.cleverclogs.org Marjolein Hoekstra

    Subscribing to hosted OPML files, also called Reading Lists, is a feature that isn’t yet offered by many RSS tool vendors yet. Undisputed pioneer in this field is BlogBridge – http://www.blogbridge.com – an open-source feed reader that I happen to like very much especially because of exactly this feature. It lets you publish Reading Lists for others to track, and it lets you track the OPML files that others make available anywhere on the web using any service they choose. This means that you can subscribe to someone’s OPML file hosted by NewsGator Online, for example, and be notified when OPML file is updated. Or you can load the CNET Top 100 and stay informed of changes to that list.

  • http://michael.susens-schurter.com/blog Michael Schurter

    @Marjolein:

    Thanks for the link! That’s a very interesting project, and I love how it utilizes OPML! I’m a bit surprised that there’s only one project out there really integrating OPML in a useful way.

    However, I’m not too excited about downloading a Java app. The app looks nice, but its just not my style. I did sign up under My BlogBridge in case there’s an online interface I can use.

    Thanks again!