I think some pretty impressive mental gymnastics are required to see web search replacing even a tiny portion of the functionality of RSS, particularly when compared to other "feeds" like FB, G+, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Well that's certainly true but it doesn't contradict his point. A free RSS tool prevents a lot of otherwise would-be searches. Especially since Google Search basically replaced URL input.
Does it really? I can't imagine anyone tech savvy enough to use an RSS reader, just switching to manually searching for each site. It's not like free RSS readers stopped existing with the death of GReader, and there's Twitter and even just bookmarks.
It 100% contradicts his point. Google loses more from the massive amount of people who would be pushed to spend more time on Facebook and Twitter than they do from the microscopic amount of extra searches you think RSS displaced.
And I still don't see how that even makes any sense: Googling something is an active search for a specific piece of content (even as broad as one site) and feeds of any kind are passive consumption of content which is brought to you. I can't imagine a universe in which someone loses their feed of content and increases their web search activity instead of switching to another (perhaps less-useful) feed of content.
If you set up a server-side aggregator, with keyword filtering (imagine a large list, something in the +thousands of words) and have your reader check for those words every few minutes, you're basically plugged into the search engine, completely bypassing their front end. You can suck up their results, then filter those yourself, again. Even when they give you a limited number of searches, you can still set up multiple smaller RSS feeds, then put them all in one big feed. Do this for multiple search engines and you never have to click on their pages again.
It's basically a free service with no return for a search engine, while they're paying for the processing.
