I just learned about a new feed reader called FastLadder on Lifehacker. What excited me about the Lifehacker post was the following,
Fastladder has integrated search! It’s really fast and easy to use. I’m not sure yet how deep the search goes (i.e., I don’t know how many feed items Fastladder saves), but what’s there is really good.
Too many times when running through feeds in Google Reader I would like to search on something I know I read but can’t recall which feed. Alas there is no integrated search in Google Reader (silly, I know). So off I ran to FastLadder. The fact that I had to signup prior to even learning about the service was a bit offsetting but signup I did, which was quickly followed by uploading my OPML file.
Ok, uploading done. Where is the search field? Ahh, right where you would expect it to be, above the list of feeds. I do a search for FastLadder and get nothing. OK, I figure maybe I need to have at least read the post on FastLadder for the search to work. I run through the Lifehacker posts, yep, there’s the FastLadder post, and off to the search I go.
Again the search yields nothing.
This time I search for Lifehacker and it brings back the Lifehacker feed. This is no good.
Apparently the touted search feature does nothing but search the name of the feed you are subscribed to which makes it useless as far as I’m concerned. Ugghhh, how disappointing.
This is the first time I can recall that a Lifehacker post led me astray. I’m hoping I’m missing something and the search is really there but a couple of commenter’s on Lifehacker pointed out the same thing. Guess I should have read all the comments first.
I’m back to waiting on Google to integrate searching into their reader.
an occasional interruption 
Chuck,
It does seem odd that a Google app (even if it is a Labs app) doesn’t have search capability.
This blog has one workaround that sounds too complicated to me but might be right up your alley.
http://www.stevetrefethen.com/blog/HowIsItPossibleGoogleReaderDoesntHaveSearch.aspx
Hope this helps.
Patrick,
Thanks for the link. The steps really aren’t that complicated and if you have any problems just leave a comment on my blog and I’ll do what I can to help.
Great point about the search feature — something that wasn’t mentioned in the lifehacker review. The integrated search feature only let’s you search feed titles. This is only cool if you have a zillion feeds and you only want to read a certain feed, but are too lazy to scroll down through the list. It doesn’t have the capability to find that great article you read 2 weeks ago about the singing cat.
Patrick,
Thanks for the link to the Co-op search solution. While this is a decent work-around I don’t like the maintenance involved. Each time I add or remove a site from reader it looks like I’ll need to go through the same exercise in the Co-op engine. I guess I’m not quite that desperate for search yet, but it’s getting close.