Google Reader doesn’t search!

I keep ranting and raving that Google is primarily a search company. But nobody listens, Google least of all, it would seem.

I’ve been looking for an online aggregrator and comfort of reading and simplicity led me to use Google Reader. For quite some time, now. It’s quite a breeze to:

• Add new feeds

• Read them in one of the most Ajaxely done interfaces out there
• And it’s fast. Really, really, fast.

But when I wanted to refer a friend to an article I read recently, and I went to Google Reader to search it, I find this stupidly ironic interface staring back at me and I mumbled to myself,

“Google is a search company. I use Google’s Reader to subscribe to RSS feeds. Google lets me search for new feeds, search the entire web, even.

But it will not let me search the feeds I subscribed to for content that I know is there. I don’t remember what blog it was on, I don’t remember what date it came out (sometime last week) and I really want to tell this friend of mine about it, because it should prove to be quite useful to him.”

It looks like I now have several things I can do:

1. Give up stressing on the fact that Google is a search company.

   In any case, they only like to search for new content because content that is “read” and discarded in my Google Reader is of no consequence to Google, anyway.

2. Go manual

   Manually go through my read entries, one-by-one till I find it. And then “label” it something (Eureka! would be good) so that I can retrieve it later.

3. Give up using Google Reader.

   I’d lose the read status on my subscribed blogs, but hey, at least I’d be able to search, in some other online aggregator like Rojo. (I hope – they aren’t really a search engine company). I’ll take my .opml export, and I’ll move on.

4. Give up abusing Google Labs’ betas.

   Their betas suck. I shudder to think of my experience with Google Notebook. Google Labs keeps their betas in beta until forever anyway.

5. Give up on Google, altogether.

   Their search engine is the most gamed thing on the net, anyway, isn’t it? I think I’ll shift to Live search for a while.

   Gmail is pretty much of a POP3 thing for me. I hardly ever use/see the online interface.

   Google Talk: I gave up a long time ago, on that one. Slick and cool, it got close, but it didn’t work out. Don’t ask.

   Google Checkout: I wanted to have a look, but they wouldn’t let this Indian sign up, even. And it’s one of their few products which isn’t in beta. Maybe it has something to do with my being too much of a curmudgeon, or something like that, I guess.

   I think I’m going to try to be Google-free for some time now.