Adding Search functionality to Google Reader (or any other RSS reader)
Google Co-op is a service you may have heard a bit about, and may have simply overlooked... I know I did at first. The idea is that you can give it a list of sites that have information pertaining to a very specific subject, and create a little search engine based on only those sites, filtering out everything else. At first this seems like a bit of a parlor trick, but it's actually a very powerful concept and one that can be exploited in a number of ways, like this: Why not use Google Co-op to create your own personal search engine that only searches sites that you have subscribed to in a feed reader?
Google Operating System offers the instructions, and they are blessedly short. Here they are, in essence:
- Get a local OPML file containing your subscriptions
- Create a new Google Co-op search engine, and use a bogus site or two when it asks for what sites to search
- Go to the Advanced section of the Control Panel for the new search engine you've created and upload your OPML file
- That's it. You might want to remove your bogus URL at this point.
