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I was reading this post by Matt Cutts, and asked myself, “What’s he smoking? I don’t see any search form in Google Reader.”

I then closed my Google Reader tab and reopened it, and there it was; the search form that I’ve been pining for!

Finally, Google Reader is complete… at least for me. You can read more about this on the Official Google Reader Blog.

At first I thought it was a temporary fluke of some sort, but now, after more than three hours, I’m absolutely sure that Google Reader has some sort of problem. I’ve yet to receive a single update from Reader eventhough I’m very sure that there are new items in my subscriptions list. The last update I received was this post from PapaJoneh.

I’m starting to get really irritated by Google Reader and I think it’s inevitable now for me to look for a more reliable feed reader. Here are some things that I dislike about Google Reader:

1. Lack of search facilities
2. Mysterious update cycle; I have no idea when subscription are updated, but I know for a fact that it’s not “live”. I’ve lost more than my fair share of ReviewMe opportunities because of this
3. Doesn’t accept spaces in tags

Yup, that’s not a lot, I know. However, in terms of quality of feed reading, the first two items alone are very irritating to me as a feed subscriber. Of course the recent release of Google Gears and email-to-friends features in Reader got more than its fair share of web exposure, however, I fail to understand why more effort wasn’t put into the core function of Google Reader; ie. improving the feed subscription and reading experience.

Do you use an online feed reader? Yes? Please recommend some to me. I got a feeling that I’ll be dumping Google Reader very soon.

I’ve been actively using Google Reader as my sole feed reader consistently for more than a month. Mind you, I have been playing with it since its inception but now I’ve pretty much familiarised myself with the interface.

Overall, I’m pleased with my Google Reader experience, except for one critical aspect which I found extremely strange for a Google product; the complete absence of a search interface.

I mean if there’s one thing that you’d expect from Google, it’ll be robust search capabilities. Check out Google Labs, every single project developed there, bar Google Reader of course, has some form of search function.

After writing this post, it seems that I’m not the only person who wants this feature.

Hopefully searching will be integrated in Google Reader soon