In all our excitement about the long-overdue search bar in Google Reader, we forgot to tell you about some of the other awesome updates to Google's RSS reader.

Increased unread items counts

If you subscribe to 2 or 3 RSS feeds, you might not have noticed. But Google Reader used to have this annoying habit of capping the number of unread posts that it would notify you about at 100. If you had 87 unread posts in a category, you could tell at a glance. If you had 874, you were in the dark.

Google has raised the cap to 1000. But as you can see from our little screengrab, even that's not enough for some people (who we won't name).

Back and forth and back and forth again

Don't like having to look at just how many unread message you have? Just click the arrow that separates the side navigation from your reader window and you'll be left with nothing but articles. Or you can just hit the letter U on your keyboard, like always.

And Google Reader now supports navigating with the back and forward buttons on your browser. If you switched folders and want to switch back, just hit the back button.