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I have a number of busy RSS feeds for which I only find a subset of the messages to be of interest to me. Is there a way to configure Google reader to only display certain RSS items that match particular keywords rather than giving me the entire feed?

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Some high-volume sites are now offering RSS feeds for keywords and/or categories. Subscribing to one of those feeds instead would certainly cut down on the clutter. – Al Everett Jul 9 '10 at 12:24

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I don't know of a way of doing it directly in Google Reader however Yahoo have a particularly nice rss/atom feed processing engine called Yahoo Pipes. This allows you to pull a number of feeds from other places apply translations and filtering to them, and then re-publish the modified feed. You can then set Google Reader (Or any other preferred RSS reader for that matter) to subscribe to the newly published Yahoo Pipes RSS feed. The interface is drag-n-drop. You literally build "pipes". Plus there is a full gallery of other peoples published pipes that you can use as examples, or even as components to your own pipe.

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While the design of Yahoo Pipes is pretty brilliant, I find the implementation a little unreliable. I've been burned too many times by feeds going unrefreshed for days or weeks and then all of the sudden refreshing. I would be more likely to build my own clone service than to use Yahoo Pipes again in the future. – Adam Tuttle Jul 1 '10 at 1:27
I have to admit I'm inclined to agree with you Adam. I use a pipe to group a number of the separate BBC news feeds into one, then remove duplicates. And I do tend to get the updates in large batches :-} – Vagnerr Jul 1 '10 at 12:22
webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/357/… google alert lets you create own feeds with help of keywords and search operators pretty much like yahoo pipes – Hauser Jul 23 '11 at 10:44
up vote 1 down vote

Yes! You can do this in Google reader, but I don't think you can set up as a permanent search.

  • If you have a group of feeds you want to search through, bundle them together under a single folder/tag. Like group all your tech news feeds you read into "Webtards."
  • Then you can use the search box at the top of Reader to search for a keyword, and filter it to just the feeds in your tag/label. So you can search for "Twitter" in your group of feeds "Webtards" to see everything your webtards are saying about Twitter.

Reader also gives you the ability to search within an individual feed, which is also helpful. So if you subscribe to the TechCrunch feed, you can search for "Twitter" within the feed "TechCrunch" and get back a bunch of articles from MG Siegler, God bless him.

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This isn't technically a way to filter a feed, but it is an interesting alternative – Casebash Jun 30 '10 at 23:25
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There is not a way to save a filter within Reader, but you can perform a search (you can search within a folder/tag) that you would like to save and you can copy the url from your browser's address bar or save it as a bookmark. When you would like to see those results again you can click the bookmark and the same search will be run.

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up vote 7 down vote

There's a GreaseMonkey script called Google Reader Filter which allows you to specify lists of words to kill - if the word appears in the title, that item gets dimmed. More info here and here

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up vote 0 down vote

Take a look at this greasemonkey script from PostRank, http://labs.postrank.com/gr. It allows filtering of feeds in google reader based on its rankings. If you don't find their rankings useful, then their greasemonkey script itself may potentially be useful in determining how to create your own script.

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up vote 0 down vote

Unfortunately Google Reader is not evolving much.

You'll have to use a third party tool.

I use Feedrinse. It's free and is simple enough.

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http://www.google.com/alerts

You can create a feed out of it. Just put your keywords into it and the site, e.g.

scienceblogs.com evolution biology

Afaik you can use pretty much all google operators for google alerts

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