Hallelujah!! One of the most popular online RSS readers just got better. Last night, Google  announced that Google Reader now has a search box.

Finally, you can search Google Reader across all of your subscribed feeds, within tags or even search individual subscriptions. The lack of a built-in search has always been the most frustrating missing feature in a reader built by the biggest name in search.

So how does it work? Take a look:

Using the text box shown above, you enter in your search phrase, then select “all items” or a specific folder or type of folder you would like to search for. Google Reader then sorts the searches by date and places them in a green tab named “search results.” Thankfully, Google Reader shows you search results for both read and unread items, so you’ll be able to find that thing you read last week…you know, the one that you’ve completely forgotten what blog it was from. 

Also included in the search release are a few other needed Reader tweaks. You can hide the side navigation by clicking on the separator to its right. For the RSS overloaded among us, unread counts now go to 1,000, so you can know just how far behind you really are. Last but not least, Reader now behaves like every other web page and lets you use the forward and back buttons to move between folders and subscriptions that you’ve navigated to.

Only the Google Reader guys know why it took this long to put the search feature into their otherwise full-featured RSS reader. Regardless, it is a very useful feature especially for RSS-addicts who have tons of feed subscriptions to wade through.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 6:43 am under Google.

Read more entries by Ema Kwiatkowski.
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