As a google employee, I wouldn't use Reader now even if it magically came back. Fool me once, etc., etc. In fact, I wouldn't use any third-party service. I have the skills, and readers are easy to build; there's just no reason to outsource this particular product.
I will latch on to this commend to recommend http://tt-rss.org/ which I have been running since the demise of GReader and have been very happy with it. Performant with a huge number of feeds, able to share arbitrary items in your own public RSS feed, decent android client and wonderfully abrasive support forums. screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/I7YLePz.png
Their interface forgets I've read things, and their CSS has always been a huge fuck-up. Even after you turn off the stupid "magazine mode", it cuts off images at some small number of hundreds of pixels while there's a thousand pixels of whitespace to the right.
I switched to theoldreader.com and have been much happier.
Meaningful search (above top-3) is still not free. Which is honest and fair, but that worked pretty well in GReader and I'd consider it a regression. I still use it daily.