I’ve got another reason why you should set up your Google Reader- it is searchable. Have you ever tried to quote something you read online and you just could not remember the details? This happened to me recently. I was trying to determine the correct way to spell e-mail, is it “email” or “e-mail”. I checked a few books but I wanted to know where Dan Santow from Word Wise landed on this issue. I thought I had read a post on the topic before. First I went to the Word Wise blog, but without knowing exactly which post I was searching for I had to search through each individual post. I did not want to invest that much time into solving this problem. So, I decided to search my Google Reader and it worked wonderfully.

It turns out that Dan did not directly address this question in a specific post. My results from searching “email” returned no hits, while “e-mail” returned several blog posts. Whenever Word Wise refers to e-mails he uses the hyphen. So, I discovered the Elephants of Style is still correct.

Google Reader allows you to run several different types of searches. There is a search box at the top of your Google Reader; type keywords from the post into the search box. Using this search box you can search all items, a specific blog or even notes that you added to a specific blog post. After you type in the word and click search…. Voila! A list of all the blog posts in your reader that meet your search criteria will appear. Now you only have to scroll through a few blog posts to find the post you were looking for.

This trick works retroactively. Let’s say you read a post a month ago on a blog that is not in your Google Reader. If you subscribe to that blog you will get back posts as well.