Google reader adds RSS search; but I want more

Finally!

search is finally in Google Reader. Now you can find that that apricot recipe you came across a few months ago and now have a craving for. Or perhaps you’d like to search for “ipod” so that you can read at once all the posts in your subscriptions that mention today’s announcements.

Search lets you use keywords to find items in your subscriptions (if you’re looking to search all blogs, give Blog Search a try). If you subscribe to someone’s shared items, it’ll search those too.

OK, I’ve only been using Google Reader for two weeks, but the very first thing I noticed was the lack of a search function. It seems obvious that a Google service would have some sort of search capability, but it just wasn’t there. It’s a welcome feature addition, though now I’d like to see Reader add a storage quota and save headlines indefinitely like Gmail does (and allow users to pay for upgraded storage as they already do for Gmail and Picasa). Ultimately Reader should be integrated directly into Gmail with a unified interface.

What would be tremendously useful would be to make a given search public, and publish a RSS feed of its own. This could then be subscribed to like any other feed or fed in Yahoo Pipes, Twitter, or other APIs.

And while I’m wishing for ponies, can we also have a direct “Blog this” button for each headline, right next to “email this”, which integrates directly into Blogger and copies the tags over to the Labels?