General musings on programming languages, and Java.

Friday, February 23, 2007

Google without the Search - Google Reader

I use quite a few Google services, but I noticed for the first time that Google Reader has no search facility - I sometimes don't remember to bookmark something I've replied to, and then have to search for it again if I want to check for updates. It seems fairly odd for a search company to omit search. For a few hours on Google Reader yesterday, I noticed that in the List View the titles of the articles weren't shown unless I clicked on them. I just switched to the Expanded View for that period, so I'm glad I only had a couple of hundred posts to scroll through (and a mousewheel!). I also find Google Docs a bit weird, it's started telling me occasionally that another collaborator has made some edits, and the edits from the last few seconds will be removed. Not a huge problem, but I'm the only person with the rights to edit the document in question. Marking things as bold, or changing the fonts, etc., sometimes happens to other text besides the bit I've selected, too. Perhaps Google's code quality is suffering as the organisation grows, or perhaps there's too little (none?) testing before features are pushed out to beta projects. After all, Google is using beta users as testers, but we're also using them. The reason everyone was happy to use Gmail in beta was because it was so damn good. It's a shame that other Google services aren't treated as killer apps like Gmail was.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I don't consider Google Reader to be one of their better products. In addition to lack of the search, the "Manage subscriptions" page feels a bit hokey. Also the site can be a bit quirky under Safari.

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A salsa dancing, DJing programmer from Manchester, England.