How do I delete individual items from a feed in Google Reader?
This is a frequently asked question and I’m afraid the answer is that you can’t 😦
11 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
About
UKeiG (The UK eInformation Group) is a respected and well-established network for all information professionals, users and developers of electronic information resources. Further information on UKeiG can be found on our main web site.
Flickr Photos
Feeds & Alerts
UK eInformation Group 
I don’t think I’ll be using google reader if we can’t pick and choose what we want to read.
Me neither.
It’s worthless and irritating to be stuck with an honest mistake in selection.
What a silly, thing to design something like that!!!
In Google.com, go to the top right (next to where it has your e-mail/login, and go to My Account. Click on the Settings link next to Reader. Go to the Subscriptions window. Check the box for the one or ones you want to delete, and then click the Unsubscribe button.
Hi dwebb235,
That deletes the whole feed. What I cannot find is a way to delete individual headlines/stories or groups of a headlines from a feed.
Karen
In the Reader, left pane right at the bottom, you will see a link “Manage subscriptions”. Click on this. This will take you to a page where all your subscriptions are listed with check boxes against each. Check the boxes for the subscriptions that you want to remove. Near the top, click on the Unsubscribe button. This will remove the subscriptions you no longer want. Then click “Back to Google Reader” at the top and you will find that the subscriptions that you removed are no longer listed.
Hi Mohan,
As I said in an earlier reply that deletes the whole feed. There is no way that you can delete individual headlines or stories from a feed.
Why is ukeig’s request so hard to fathom? I am having the same frustration of trying to delete INDIVIDUAL items from a particular feed. If anybody has an idea….
For some reason, the answer to “How do I delete a post or article in google reader” is always something completely unhelpful or dismissive like “You don’t need to delete…” or “Why did you subscribe to a feed if you don’t want its contents?” The answer is, YES I do need to delete (and apparently I am not the only one) and “Hey, I have News searches that sometimes include articles I don’t need. (which is perfectly acceptable, because I should be able to just delete them!)”
Marking them “read” is really not helpful, because I don’t want to have to click on 8 headlines I know I’m not going to need (I also get the lecture on “How do you know you’re not going to need it in the future?” my answer is, Look, I know and also, I don’t need to become a packrat!”) We should be able to just quickly click down the checkboxes of several headlines and hit a button labelled… “DELETE”! This is available on gmail. Why is google being so adamant about now having this on reader?!?!
Hi Ashau,
I entirely agree with you. You can delete messages from gmail even though they say you don’t need to. So, OK, they say you don’t need to delete articles from Google Reader but there are times, like you, when I DO want to delete them. Some stories I want to keep: others are irrelevant and just clutter up the screen and make it more difficult for me focus on the relevant stuff.
Another annoying ‘feature’, or perhaps it’s a bug, is that when you subscribe to a new feed it sometimes pulls up stories that are no longer in the current version of the feed. Google reader seems to pulling up headlines that are in its cache, which is very unhelpful especially if the story, article or document is no longer available. For example, I have just subscribed to the UKeiG events RSS feed. The feed on the UKeiG web site lists meetings, workshops and seminars that UKeiG will be holding over the next 6-8 months and I KNOW it is kept up to date. Events that have taken place are deleted from the feed. Google’s version of the feed lists events going back to March 2006. Click on the link of a past event to see the full details on the UKeiG web site and of course you get a 404 error message. And all this useless, ancient stuff is cluttering up Google Reader, which is why I don’t use it!
Do you mean to tell me, that one of the largest, most, most successful tech companies in the world forgot to put a del function in Goofle Reader so I get rid of a story I read last week?
How di I delete an individual story within a single RSS feed?
If nothing else I wish that google would re-ping the rss feed to see if some of the posts HAD been deleted. I had google reader monitoring the rss feed of my forums… which then got hit by spam bots that posted porn.
We’ve gotten rid of the porn since then and secured the forums even further but google reader still displays it.
The only way that I could find to get rid of the problem was to actually go through and rename the file that created the feed to something else… which screwed up all sort of URL-based things everywhere.
Usually I like Google’s stuff, but this reader failed pretty hard because It wouldn’t simply acknowledged that some content was removed from a feed.