If you’ve haven’t been bowled over by the recent Apple announcement of an iPhone sans phone, you may have noticed that Google Reader now has search.

I’ll admit, I didn’t notice it. And I use Google Reader as my feed reader! But as soon as I read a post on it (say, these posts from Download Squad, LifeHacker, Solo Technology), man, did I notice it. Very cool. And about time.

Funny, no little “new features” highlighted in Google Reader though - kind of like a stealth release. The posts I refer to above mention some of the new key features, e.g.,

1. You can now search feeds with a text box at the top of your screen

2. If you click on the down arrow by “All items”, you’ll see something like this:

Basically, you can search on the following dimensions:

• all items (no idea of how far back these “all items” go - every item ever read in your reader?)
• starred items
• shared items
• any individual folder
• any individual feed

3. You can navigate to the search field with your keyboard - hit the “/” key to get there.

4. Instead of maxing out at 100 unread items, you now max out at 1000. So, when you have 899 posts to read, you’ll know it! (I kind of liked the suspense myself, waiting to see when I would read enough to get below 100.)

5. You an hide the side panel with a mouse click now. There’s a tiny little grey arrow midway down the page, between the blue side panel and the white preview panel. Click that to lose the panel. I didn’t realize it, but you can do the same thing with your keyboard, with the “u” key.

And, even after hiding the side panel, you can still get to the stuff therein, without opening it up again. There’s now a drop-down menu available:

6. You can use the back/forward keys when you’ve been navigating between folders.

7. Ajaxy goodness means that as you keep scrolling down in your search research, Google Reader will keep fetching new ones for you.

8. The little beaker showing you progress is gone. Replaced by the not-as-cute generic button whirlygig.

Get More Out of Search

Although Google Reader’s new search is a great step in the right direction, there are a few quirks that I noticed. Here’s what I noticed, and how to get around it.

1. Use the Keyboard

The button by “all items” and the Search button itself seem to be wonky. You can click on “all items” and start typing, say to enter your favourite tag. But then, hitting the search button acts the same as hitting the down arrow - your list shows up again. I’ve had to hit the search button a few times to get it to work properly.

My solution: don’t use the mouse. I use the “/” key to navigate to the search field. Type what I’m looking for. Tab. Type what tag/feed I want. Enter. Enter, again, if necessary.

2. Expanded and List Still Work

I haven’t seen it discussed yet, but even with the search page, you can make use of the Expanded and List views. You won’t lose your search results, but you’ll be able to either see all of of the posts (expanded), just the titles (list), or a googly summary (default search view).

Bonus tip: The keyboard works here too (at least in Firefox):

• Hit 1 to get to the Expanded view.
• Hit 2 to get to the List view.
• Hit 3 to get to the Search view. (Counter-intuitive, I know, since it’s first in line, but at least doesn’t break the previous 1 and 2 mappings.)

3. Searching Your Tags

As I said before, you can narrow your search down to any particular tag, sorry, folder. Now what’s the point of that. The whole reason I have a gazillion tags is because Reader didn’t have search, so I was forced back into the old “sort, don’t search” mentality. Now they want me to search again? But only one tag at a time? Yeesh.

I’ve got a way around it, but it sucks, especially if you have a lot of tagged feeds. Now, I’m not talking about the folder that a feed is assigned to, but rather, the tags that you assign when you see a post you really like. What I did was go through each and every one of those posts that I had added previously. And I added a new tag called “keep”, in addition to the other tags I had. Now, when I want to search something I tagged (because I usually remember that I tagged something, I just don’t know where), I do a search on the “keep” folder. Voila. Yes, I could just do a search on “All items”, but then I’d have to wade through all the dross that I didn’t think was worth tagging in the first place!

4. How Far Back?

Curious as to how far back the search goes, I did a little experiment. I did a search on items from my blog. I don’t post all that often, but reasonably consistently. It took a little while to get to the bottom of the list, i.e., the first post captured by the search, but that dates back to October 2005.

I’m pretty sure I haven’t been using Google Reader that long. So, obviously there is some magic going on that lets Google Reader read my feed that far back. Pretty cool.

As another experiment, I searched for “a” in all of my tagged posts. Surely I tagged something pretty soon after starting to use Google Reader for the first time. This brings me back to November 2006.

This date seems more reasonable. I thought I had switched readers in the past year or so.

5. Preview or Straight to Source

When you’re looking at the list of results returned in the search view, you can either choose to go to the preview of the post in Reader, complete with coloured highlighting of search terms. You do this by clicking on the title of the post. Or, you can go straight to the source web page by clicking on the double arrow on the right.

Still Needs Work

Don’t get me wrong, I love the new Google search. But there are a couple of things I find annoying.

For instance, I hate the fact that I can’t just search in all of my tags. I have to search through each one individually, or start using one “master” tag for all posts I want to keep track of (as discussed above). I’d like to see a way to search on say “folders”, or “manually assigned folders”, or something like that.

Secondly, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but once you’ve found something in your search results that you like, you can see the post, even with special highlighting of your terms. Very nice. You can navigate to the original post (but the “v” shortcut key doesn’t work here), you can star it, share it, email it, or mark it read/unread. The only thing you can’t do, the logic for which escapes me, is add a tag to it! I guess the only way around that is to star or share the post, and then go look for it, out of search mode, so you can then tag it. Strange.