[Um, OK. Full disclosure: I don’t actually have anything to report about Nashville going country. I just thought it was a sufficiently stupid and self-evident comparison.]

The Google team has finally resolved the most mystifying software omission ever: they’ve added search capabilities to Google Reader.

(click to embiggen)

Maybe they took their time because they wanted to do it right. It does work, and it works well. You can search across all your feeds, or select your starred or shared items, or search within a folder, or search within a specific feed. I mean, seriously, you couldn’t really ask for more.

Well, yes, I suppose you could. You could ask for the ability to search within a selected set of feeds. You could ask for advanced search filtering capabilities, such as limiting your search to a date range. Most people aren’t going to have enough feeds or items to search within that these advanced capabilities would be all that useful, but those of us who follow hundreds of feeds would find it very helpful.

Still, I imagine it’s not out of the realm of possibility that those types of features will be coming. And what’s more important is that Google Reader, by my estimation, now has no barriers to the claim of “best feed reader.” At least for those of us who expect to be able to read feeds across multiple devices (in my case: personal Mac laptop, work PC laptop, and Treo 680) without the need to synchronize.

So for those of you who may have tried Google Reader and abandoned it, are you going to give it another try because of this? Or are there still features that don’t stack up for you?