5 Ways To Use Google Reader As Your Personal Social Search Centre

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post about How to Make Google Reader Your Web Brain and it turned out to be pretty popular. 

First it was shared by Steve Rubel of the excellent blog Micro Persuasion on his FriendFeed stream, and then, as a result, was re-shared by many others, thanks to the wonderful domino train that is social media. 

In fact, my post even made it on to what looks like the Chinese version of slashdot (not up anymore), and was reposted in full (with attribution) on this Chinese forum. 

In any case, the moral of the story is this: I'm kind of a big deal in China People obviously enjoy learning about clever ways to hack their web content-filtering with Reader.   

And so, today, we'll revisit that theme as I show you 5 ways to use Google Reader as your very own personalized social search engine.

Micro-Search is So Hot Right Now

Don't get me wrong, Google's Search engine is great. After all, it hasn't grabbed over 60 percent market share by serving up half-baked, inaccurate results. 

But as the web grows wider and wider and deeper and deeper, and ever more content-saturated, finding exactly what we're looking for has become increasingly difficult, especially when the average user gives up after the first page of results (myself included.) 

That's why in my previous article on this subject, I extolled the virtues of depending on content filters to narrow down your web universe. If you're looking for useful information, filtering is a good place to start. 

Begin with the sites your friends or favourite bloggers really enjoy, then turn to popular communal suggestions like those in Reader's pre-packaged bundles and contextual recommendations or on third-party aggregators like RSSMeme. These are all great ways to shorten the haystack before you start looking the proverbial needle.

But what I didn't address in that article (in so many words), was exactly how these recommendation-filters can help you when you're searching for content on a specific subject. 

That's what Search Engines are good at, after all, responding to our random queries with (hopefully) relevant results. But what if we could combine the relevancy of that social filtering with the efficiency and accuracy of Google search? Wouldn't that be the Holy Grail?

Well  if so, then your chalice awaits Indy, because this harmonic combination is already possible and I'm going to show you how. 

Three of the following tips are simple, and two of them are more involved hacks, but all five will help you find what you're looking for more efficiently from one central search box within Reader.

1) Google Reader As Your Personal Library

If you'll remember from last week's lecture, class, we discussed how to keep track of all your favourite content on the net, both inside and outside of Google Reader using the Reader's Share It Now tools.

Well our first lesson today builds on that, and is quite simple: by using Reader as your web brain and collecting all your favourite content from around the web in one place, you are effectively creating your very own personal library of interesting reading material. And the good news is, you don't even need to know Dewey to find what you're looking for!

Au contraire, it is extremely simple to find what you need with Reader's Shared Items. 

To use an example you can all relate to, imagine that you need to make some haggis for the upcoming Scottish Festival. Didn't you read a great recipe a few weeks ago and file it away in your favorites?

Well it's easy enough to find out: Just type your query into GReader's search box, select "Shared Items" from the drop-down box and bam - in seconds you've retrieved that amazing article on how to make haggis at home from The Disgusting Scottish Delicacies Blog.* You should have known that's where you saw it, but no matter. You don't need a memory of your own anymore, remember right?  

*Hopefully not a real blog 

2) Didn't I Read That On One of My Favourite Blogs Once?

But suppose for a moment that (heaven forbid) you had forgotten to Share that article when you read it and so it wasn't saved to your favourites feed? Well, all would still not be lost, and that is the beauty of Reader. This used to require a hack just a short week ago, but has since been added as a new Reader feature.

Now, with a quick tweak of the drop-down selection to "Read Items", you can pore through an itemized list of all the articles you've ever Read in Reader about "making your own haggis" since you first signed up (a lot, I know, but you gotta start somewhere.)

3) Hey, Wait, I Think I Clicked Through And Read That One On The Site!

If you still can't find what you're looking for by slogging through your Read Items Search, you can use a little hack to make your search even more specific. 

Suppose, for example, that you remember that when you saw that great haggis recipe, you were so excited that you clicked through to the blog and left the page open so you wouldn't forget about it.

But then maybe it was open in one of your 400 tabs when Firefox decided to crash and you decided to declare tab bankruptcy rather than wrangle them all into submission. And so your recipe was lost. 

Or was it?  

With this great hack from Ionut over at the Google Operating System blog (a modification of the one that used to be necessary for the Read Items feed, see above), you can set up a search of all the feed items that prompted you to click the link through to the actual blog! 

Just follow these 3 simple steps:

i. In Google Reader, highlight the URL bar and replace the text with this string:

javascript:prompt("User ID", _USER_ID);void(0);

Google will kindly provide a popup with a string of numbers: that's your USERID. Copy and paste the number somewhere else.

ii. Go back to Reader, click "Add Subscription" and paste this address into the box:

http://www.google.com/reader/atom/user/USERID/state/com.google/tracking-item-link-used

You'll want to replace "USERID" with the number you found in step one, of course.

iii. Now you'll see a new feed called "tracking-item-link-used" (you can change the name in the Reader Settings if you wish.) 

When you want to search your click-through feeds, just type your query and select your new feed from the drop down menu and presto, you're in business.

4) Well I'm Sure Someone I Subscribe To Must Have Written Something About This Somewhere at Some Point...

"Alas," you say, "that's all fine and dandy, but what if I have never even read an article about making my own haggis, even though I am pretty sure there must have been something at some point on one of the many Scottish cuisine blogs to which I subscribe." 

And I'm so glad you said that (so eloquently, to boot), because Reader can still be helpful even in this case: It has time to read through all your subscriptions even when you don't! 

So once again, with a quick tweak the drop down menu, this time to "Search All". and a quick search, you can reveal every article ever written by your trusted sources on the subject, whether you actually read them or not. 

5) I Know I Read About It Somewhere ... But I Don't Think It Was Even In Reader   

Suppose you tried all of the above to no avail. You must have read that article somewhere else, outside Reader. Maybe you clicked through to a link from your Scotch friend on Twitter. Come to think of it, maybe you even did a Google Search for haggis recipes and that's how you came across it in the first place. Who can remember that far back anyway? The point is, you have to give up at some point, right? 

Wrong. Because Google Reader has one more trick up its sleeve.

Now this hack is the most involved of the bunch, but it's well worth it if you truly want Reader to be your one-stop-search-stop. Imagine being able to search any site you've ever visited, all from within Reader. 

Sure, you could always use Firefox 3's Awesome Bar to search through your previous web history pretty easily. But what if you don't use FF3, or you do but hate the Awesome Bar? What if you don't like to keep web history on your computer, for whatever reason? What if you need to find something when you're away from your main computer? 

Enter Super GReader, and his sidekick, Google Web History. 

Follow these four easy steps and you'll be well on your way to Google Reader Search Nirvana.

i) First, you will need to go here to download the Google Toolbar for Firefox, or here for IE. Don't worry, the Toolbar is pretty unobtrusive, especially if you change the layout setting to "Replace Firefox Search and Hide Toolbar" and it actually provides some useful tools like PageRank-checking and auto-form-filling. No spyware, guaranteed.  

ii) Next, go here and click Enable Web History. This will allow Google to keep an online and completely secure record of the sites you visit while logged in to your Google Account. (If you really don't want to use the Google Tool Bar, you can still use Web History by using one of the workarounds outlined here.)

iii) Now, because we want to centralize everything in reader, we need to take the information from your new Web History account and turn it into a feed. Luckily, Google provides one at this address: https://www.google.com/history/?output=rss Unluckily, Google Reader does not support authenticated feeds (feeds that require your login and password to work.) If it did, we would be done here. Since it doesn't though, we'll need to take one more step.

iv) Go to FreeMyFeed.com. This is a simple site that does one thing and one thing well: It takes any secured feed and, while protecting your privacy, parses it into a regular feed that you can use in Reader, and other feed-readers that don't support authenticated feeds. All you need to do is paste https://www.google.com/history/?output=rss into the "feed url" box, enter your Google Username and Password and click Submit. FreeMyFeed will then give you a new RSS address that you can add to Google Reader manually the same way you would add any other. 

And there you have it, you will now see a feed called Google Web History in your Reader that is searchable alongside all your other content. 

One Search Hub to Rule Them All

Good search is my substitute for poor organization. That's why on my Mac, I just throw all my documents into one singular folder and trust Spotlight or Quicksilver to find them when I need them. No intricate folder hierarchies for me, thankyouverymuch. 

Likewise, that's why I've always relied on Google Search to find what I need on the web in the past, and that's why I was thrilled when Reader introduced search less than a year ago.

The fact is, with so much information swirling around the internet, it's impossible for our puny human minds to keep up. So why not leverage the brain power of Google Reader to find exactly what we need, exactly when we need it? 

I hope this guide helps you to do just that.

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How about you- What methods do you use to search for relevant content from within your sphere of trusted sites? Do you have any hacks like this that we should know about? Let us know in the comments!

And if you thought this post was the best thing since sliced bread, please add it to your Google Reader Shared Items so you can find it again later! If you'd rather, you can also Tweet it, Digg it, Stumble It or whatever else you like to do to share good content with your friends online. Thanks!