Google Reader Beta

CNET editors' take

• Reviewed by:
  Elsa Wenzel
• Reviewed on: 10/10/2005

The Google machine is in overdrive, and the release of Google Reader Beta brings the company closer to becoming a one-stop portal for your e-mail, hand-picked news, and more. Google Reader Beta is a free, Web-based service that allows you to create a personalized newswire of RSS feeds. Coming on the heels of the recent rollout of Google Blog Search Beta, the timing of the Google Reader announcement makes sense. With the groundwork laid for scouring the content of blogs, making that content available to individual readers is the next logical step. Google's powerful search capabilities make its Reader more appealing than other RSS services, such as the otherwise excellent NewsGator, which sometimes turns up few or no relevant results when you look for obscure subjects. You must have a Gmail e-mail account to test Google Reader Beta; if so, just access the reader by logging on at reader.google.com.

The clean layout of Google Reader Beta makes it easy to search for and scroll through feeds.

Upside: Overall, we found the blue-and-white interface of Google Reader Beta uncluttered and intuitive. It wastes little screen space by organizing content into four sections: Home Page, Your Subscriptions, Read Items, and Starred (as with Gmail, you can highlight incoming feeds with a star icon). Finding content to subscribe to is easy; just type a phrase or a publication name into the upper-left search box, and Google Reader retrieves up to 10 results. If you're familiar with the ins and outs of Google search, you can make searches as specific as possible. Look up "make your own biodiesel," for example, and you'll find precise directions from 10 blogs. We tried to trick Google Reader Beta by subscribing three times to a single feed, but it smartly recognized the duplicate and added only one. Once you've added some feeds, click Google Reader's Top, Up, or Down links within the list of blogs, and the contents scroll down in a slick way without demanding repeated mouse clicks. You can sort feeds by name or date added and import or export your feeds.

If you keep a Web journal at Blogger.com, Google Reader Beta lets you immediately make a post related to a feed you're reading.

Keyboard shortcuts spelled out at the bottom of the page let you navigate--moving to the next feed by typing the letter J, for instance. Savvy Google engineers added the ability to attach labels to feeds, similar to tags that categorize content in blog searches, such as Technorati, and bookmarkers, such as del.icio.us. And for bloggers, Google provides a nice surprise; click the More Actions drop-down box above the text of any message and pick Blog This to post an entry to your Blogger account.

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Visit the Google Reader Web site and log in to your Gmail account to test the Google Reader.

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