How did Google Reader start, and who built it?
Google Reader came out of Google's 20 percent time, the policy that let engineers spend a day a week on their own projects. The engineer behind it was Chris Wetherell, who had been building feed tools around Blogger since the early 2000s.
The prototype was codenamed Fusion. The team floated names like Transmogrifier and Reactor before landing on Reader, and Google shipped it publicly on October 7, 2005, through Google Labs, the company's holding pen for experiments. The first day did not go smoothly: the site crashed under its own launch traffic.
What survived that launch was plain by design. White background, no trending panel, no recommendation engine. You added a site's RSS feed and everything that site published showed up in order, newest first. Keyboard shortcuts let heavy users move through hundreds of items without a mouse: J and K to move between articles, S to star, V to open the original page.
That was the whole product, and it was enough. Within a couple of years Reader had pulled the RSS audience away from Bloglines and NewsGator and become the default way to read the web on the web's own terms.
What made Google Reader's shared items so hard to replace?
In 2007 Google added shared items. One click pushed an article into a public feed that your contacts could subscribe to. There were no likes, no follower counts and no reshare metrics attached to it.
The result was a recommendation system made of people rather than math. Instead of leaning on a link aggregator like Digg, readers got their next article from a friend who happened to read closely in one narrow field. The volume was low and the hit rate was high.
It also picked up a use Google never planned for. In Iran, where the government blocked news sites one at a time, Reader's shared items circulated material the state media would not carry. Blocking Reader meant touching the same Google login that Gmail and Search ran on, which made it an awkward target.
That is the feature people still ask about, and it is the one no replacement has matched. Feedly, Inoreader and NewsBlur all read feeds well. None of them carry the same network of readers who were already inside the product.
How did Google+ turn Reader into a maintenance project?
In October 2011 Google rebuilt Reader's interface and stripped the sharing features out of it. The shared items page went away. Notes went away. A +1 button pointing at Google+ took their place, which meant the networks people had spent four years building inside Reader had nowhere to go. A small protest turned up outside a Google office in Washington over it.
By then the product was already in maintenance mode, meaning critical bugs got fixed and nothing else got built. Brian Shih, who ran Reader as product manager until he left Google in 2011, wrote on Quora in 2013 that "I'm pretty sure Reader was threatened with de-staffing at least three times before it actually happened."
Chris Wetherell read the same signal from the outside. He told GigaOm in 2013 that "when they replaced sharing with +1 on Google Reader, it was clear that this day was going to come." Reader was not competing with Feedly for resources at that point. It was competing with Google+, and Google+ was the company strategy.
What did Google say when it pulled the plug?
On March 13, 2013, Google published "A second spring of cleaning", a post by senior vice president Urs Holzle that listed eight products being retired. Reader was on the list. The explanation was one sentence: "While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader."
Declining is relative. In March 2013 Reader's most popular feeds each carried more than 24 million subscribers. The product was smaller than its peak and still larger than most of what has replaced it.
The response was quick and loud. A petition on Change.org passed 100,000 signatures in under two days and stood above 116,000 by that Saturday. At least eight related petitions went up alongside it. Google did not move the date.
Reader stopped serving feeds on July 1, 2013. Google left a two-week window to pull subscription lists out through Takeout, then deleted the data on July 15, 2013. There was no recovery path after that.
Where did Reader's users actually go?
Feedly, a small reader at the time, picked up more than 500,000 new users in the 48 hours after the announcement and roughly 3 million by early April 2013. NewsBlur, run largely by one developer, Samuel Clay, went from about 1,500 users to more than 60,000 and spent weeks fighting its own servers. The Old Reader and Inoreader took similar waves.
Most Reader users went nowhere. They did not pick a replacement, they simply stopped using RSS and read whatever the default feed on Twitter or Facebook put in front of them. That is the part the migration numbers hide.
The feeds themselves were not entirely lost. Archive Team, the volunteer preservation group, pulled feed history out of Reader's API before the shutoff and uploaded roughly 8,800 GB of it to the Internet Archive, where it still sits. Reading a specific feed out of those archives takes technical work, but the material is public.
Is Google Reader coming back in 2026?
No. Google Reader has been shut since July 1, 2013, and Google has never announced a revival, a successor or a reopening of the API. Searches for the product still run high, and the answer has not changed in thirteen years.
The product it was cleared out of the way for did not last either. Google+ closed for consumers on April 2, 2019, after Google said more than 90 percent of user sessions on it lasted under five seconds. Reader outlived its own replacement in usefulness and lost anyway.
What Reader left behind is a reflex. Every Google launch now draws the same response, because the list of shutdowns kept growing after 2013: Google Wave, Google Buzz, Google Inbox, Google Play Music, Picasa, Google Glass. Reader is the one people name first, because it worked, people used it, and Google closed it anyway.
What does an RSS reader cost in 2026?
Less than most people assume, and often nothing. Feedly's free tier covers 100 sources with no AI features. Feedly Pro runs about $6 a month billed annually in 2026, and the Pro+ tier with AI filtering is about $99 a year.
The free and open options are stronger than they were in 2013. NetNewsWire is open source and free on Mac and iOS. Miniflux is open source and self-hosted. NewsBlur still runs a free tier with a paid upgrade, and Inoreader sits between the free clients and Feedly on features.
RSS itself never stopped working. It is still how every podcast in the world is distributed, and most news sites still publish a feed whether or not they advertise it. What changed after 2013 is visibility: browsers dropped their built-in feed readers, the orange feed icon disappeared from address bars, and RSS became something you have to go looking for rather than something you trip over.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Google shut down Google Reader?
Google said in March 2013 that usage of Google Reader had declined and that it wanted to support fewer products. Former Reader product manager Brian Shih and creator Chris Wetherell both pointed instead at Google+, the social network Google reorganized its products around starting in 2011, which left Reader in maintenance mode with no staff to defend it.
When did Google Reader shut down?
Google Reader stopped working on July 1, 2013. Google announced the closure on March 13, 2013, and gave users until July 15, 2013 to export their subscriptions through Google Takeout before the data was deleted permanently.
What is the best Google Reader alternative in 2026?
Feedly is the closest mainstream successor to Google Reader, with a free tier for 100 sources and a Pro tier at about $6 a month billed annually in 2026. Inoreader suits heavier users, NewsBlur offers a free tier alongside paid accounts, and NetNewsWire and Miniflux are free and open source.