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Search Your Google Reader RSS Feeds

I have been using Google Reader since the 9/2006 release. It’s one of my favorite apps. One of the feature that was missing from Reader that I wished it had was Search. Well, Reader is now complete with a Search feature!

My initial testing indicates that it works well. I could not locate any help page that describes the complete search syntax, but most basic Google search syntax seem to work fine. Below are some observations.

Common words such as “where”, “how” are not excluded like regular Google Search:

Google Reader Search - common words

Phrase searches are supported:

Google Reader Search - phrases

Negative terms are supported. Example: bass -music.

The OR operator doesn’t work. Example: i730 OR i830.

Google Maps on Your Windows Mobile Phone

Google has just made available Google Maps for Windows Mobile. Here’s the blurb on Google Maps Mobile Page:

Take the power of Google Maps with you on your mobile phone.

Real-time traffic — See where the congestion is, and estimate delays in over 30 major US metropolitan areas.

Detailed directions — Whether you plan to walk or drive, your route is displayed on the map itself, together with step-by-step directions.

Integrated search results — Local business locations and contact information appear all in one place, integrated on your map.

Easily movable maps — Interactive maps let you zoom in or out, and move in all directions so you can orient yourself visually.

Satellite imagery — Get a bird’s eye view of your desired location. (It’s like you’re there, we swear.

I tried the app on my Samsung i730 Windows Mobile phone and it worked great. Map data is retrieved from Google’s servers as needed just like regular Google Maps. Response time is slower than on a desktop but still very usable on my Verizon EDVO connection.

If you are a user of Google Maps then the screen below will look familiar to you:

Google Maps

Note the transparent buttons. Great idea.

Searching for local businesses is a snap. Click Search . Type in the name of the busines. Hit OK. Search matches are displayed on the map as pushpins:

Google Maps

There is also the Satellite View, but missing is the Hybrid View.

Google Maps

More info here.

Google Co-op

Google Co-op allows you to create customized search engines to fit your search interests. .NET developers, you may want to give the following pre-customized search engines a try:

For me, Co-op is a good idea but for now I will stick with just regular Google, at least for .NET related searches. I gave SearchDotNet.com a try and was initially underwhelmed my the number of matches. For example, searching for “EntryAssembly” using the DotNetSearch engine above yielded two pages of matches. Regular Google returns 387 pages.

Google Reader Mini Review, Sharing Google Reader Items

I have settled on Google Reader as my RSS aggregator since they came out with the last upgrade (9/2006). My last aggregator was RSS Bandit. Google Reader has a slick interface and the article summaries are pulled/cached on Google server(s) so they usually come up pretty fast. Reader uses a lot of asynchronous rpc calls (known to some of you as AJAX) to provide a responsive experience. I love the ability to use keyboard shortcuts to do things such as moving to the next article, mark all items in a feed as read, etc.

Some people find the Google Reader Start Page useless… I sorta like it ok. Anyway, with the latest version, you can override the default Start Page with your own.

Another unique thing that Google Reader does is that it collects your reading statistics. It can tell you how many feed items you read in the last week/month out of the total items received. While this data is interesting in itself, I can see the potential of using it to automatically determine the most interesting items based on everybody’s reading statistics. If you can accurately track how long people spend reading certain items (hint: check the keyboard, mouse and scroll wheel movements), there is gold to mine there. Oops, did I just give away the main idea for my upcoming Web 2.0 startup?

One problem I have had so far is an HTML rendering issue in Internet Explorer 7 with certain feeds. I have not seen it lately so perhaps it has been fixed.

Google Reader

If you are already a Google Reader user, it provides an easy way to share interesting items from your feeds. When you run across something you want to share in Google Reader, just press shift-s or click on the Share link and the item will show up in your Public Shared Items web page. You can insert a clip into your blog to display the shared items there too. For Bloggers users, there is even an easier way.

Speaking of sharing items, you can also do the same thing with any of the social networking service these days. Del.icio.us comes to mind. With del.icio.us, in addition to Network Badges and Link Rolls, you can also have the ever more popular Tag Rolls. More ways to help the occasional bloggers out there add some signs of life to your blogs without having to actually write original/substantial/interesting content!

Flickr and Picasa Web

Following the crowd, I moved my photos to Picasa Web (my old photos were hosted on my custom developed ASP.NET site). Picasa Web actually works very well for an online photo album. It’s the best in its class. Check out the pictures of my son Dat Do’s Page.

After deciding that I don’t have enough time to maintain my own photos site (and still be feature competitive with all the “Web 2.0″ stuff out there) , I first looked into Flickr. I liked almost everything about Flickr, but the deal killer was Flickr’s inability to display images at higher resolutions than the paltry 500-pixel-wide default. Hello! It’s 2007. Everybody has a 24” wide screen monitor now (ok maybe not everybody)! Yes, the viewer can click on “All Sizes” to see higher resolution versions but that has to be done every time.

Picasa allows for a much better viewing experience. The images are autosized to fit your browser window! Hmm… why didn’t anyone think of THAT before (rolling eyes and shaking head)? It seems that Google is the only company that consistently comes up with ideas that totally make sense like this one. Perhaps there is a reason why Google stock price is in the stratosphere.

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