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.
