I've been using Google Reader for a long time now, in no small part due to the large doses of peer pressure applied by Chris Reeder and Page Brooks. I'd like to tell you how long I've been using Google Reader, but that is exactly the problem: Google Reader doesn't have a built in search feature. Huh? Oh, the humanity!

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

But not so much when it comes to your subscribed feeds in Google Reeder. In the place of a search feature, Google Reader provides you with the ability to tag it, maybe with a little star if you like, after that you're on your own.

Before converting to Google Reader, I was a loyal fan of RSS Bandit, which I adored. It has a few places where the usability is a little rough, search is one. Also, it takes a while synchronize remote storage of feed data. But for the most part other than that it was a dream. But I wanted perfect, and couldn't settle for good enough, especially after my feed data file got corrupted and I lost all of my saved feed history.

First thing I tried was reverting back to the previous version of Google Reader:

Almost fooled me at first until I noticed where it said, "Search for new content". No, don't search for new content, I have what I want already I just need to find it again, please.

There does appear to be a way to accomplish this in Firefox at least.

I found the original instruction guide through LifeHacker.com here.

First, you will need to export you feed list in to an OPML file. You can do that here: http://www.google.com/reader/subscriptions/export.

Now you will need to create a Google Custom Search Engine, that will be wired up to search any feed in your OPML file next.

You can create a generic dummy search engine to start off with and just point it to your blog at first.

Then you will need to open your custom search engine's control panel.

From there it is a straight forward matter of uploading your OPML file. At this point you have a search engine helper if you will that can search your feed list.

Now we just need to wire it back up to Google Reeder in Firefox using Greasemonkey using this user script.

To do this you'll need to access your custom search engine and search for something like the word test. Take the URL that produce and remove the &q=test section and replace into the user script.

The instructions are provided in the user script itself. But here's a more step by step set of instructions just in case:

Google Operating System: Script for Google Reader Search