WebProNews

File this under: "What took so long?" Google's online feedreader now has a search box for doing queries within a person's subscribed feeds. The usefulness of effective search vaulted Google from garage project to multi-billion dollar powerhouse. That search has been a glaring omission from Google's otherwise excellent newsfeed organizer, Google Reader.

That has changed as a shiny new search box appeared atop the Google Reader page. The Google Reader blog declared, "That's right, search is finally in Google Reader."

People can search across all of their feeds, including shared items they have subscribed to from their friends' feeds. The default function searches all feeds, but a dropdown choice allows for searches to be limited to shared or starred items, or just a specific feed.

The team made some other updates to Reader as well:

Along for the ride in the search release are a few other Reader tweaks. You can now hide the side navigation by clicking on the separator to its right. Unread counts now go to 1,000, so that you can know just how far behind you are when you come back from vacation. Finally, Reader now behaves like every other web page and lets you use the forward and back buttons to move between folders and subscriptions that you've navigated to.

We do have one complaint about the addition of the search box to Google Reader. It has killed the ability to use Reader in the Opera browser, as several people have already pointed out on the product's support group.