Feedly
feedly.com
Collects the sites you follow into one reverse-chronological list you control
google.com
The RSS reader that most of the web's early sharing culture ran on.
Use Feedly instead
Collects the sites you follow into one reverse-chronological list you control. The free plan stops at 100 sources and three folders, with no search across your own feed and no integrations.
Open FeedlyFor seven years this was how a large share of technically-minded readers followed the web, and its sharing and note features made it an accidental social network. Google closed it in July 2013 while it was still widely used, which is why it is remembered less as a product than as the moment people learned that a free service being popular is not the same as it being safe.
Questions
No. Google Reader is no longer running and google.com does not serve the tool any more. Feedly is the closest current equivalent — it collects the sites you follow into one reverse-chronological list you control.
Yes. Google Reader sends your input to its own servers to process it. That is fine for public material; for anything containing personal data, use one of the on-device tools instead.
Discontinued by Google in July 2013 with no replacement offered.
Alternatives
Same category or same task, ordered by how closely they overlap.
feedly.com
Collects the sites you follow into one reverse-chronological list you control
openlibrary.org
A catalogue page for every book ever published, many of them borrowable
archive.ph
Freezes one page on demand into a snapshot that keeps working when it moves
arxiv.org
Free preprints in physics, maths, computer science and quantitative biology
scholar.google.com
Searches academic papers and shows who has cited each one since
instapaper.com
Saves an article for later and strips it down to just the text