UPDATED! New Question!! and a big thanks and blogger advice needed

FYI, the new question has been added at the bottom of this post, in dark red font. 

Today I discovered that I now have 888 followers.  WOW!  What a cool number!  That's a lot of people taking a peek now and then to see what I am up to.  I am very appreciative of all of you, more than I can say.  Thanks for stopping by!

 

And now, since I have your attention (maybe) I need your help.  Let me explain: I've been doing my best to ignore the changes (doom and gloom) that are coming down the pike, in relation to using Blogger.  Avoidance has been easy, but I know I can't avoid much longer.  In fact, I have discovered that perhaps I've waited too long.

Unlike many of you, at the time I didn't really care much about the loss of the Google reader, or whatever the name of it is/was, (it's gone already; it left when I wasn't paying attention) because honestly, I only used it when I wanted to hunt for something.  Otherwise, I pretty much use the Dashboard to see what's been newly posted, and if there's something I want to find my way back to, I pin it on my Pinterest page.  However there are some things from way back that I wish I could still find, but... oh well.   And I am pretty clueless about some of the stuff you guys were recommending as a replacement (Bloglovin? etc) and of course, since I  no longer have the Google reader to search for what you were saying, I can't find your advice and recommendations any more.  Dumb of me to wait so long...  I have just spent an hour scrolling through old posts on the Dashboard to try to find what everyone was saying, and with no way to filter the posts, I never found what I was looking for.  So I need some solid advice, written in a way that someone (me) with absolutely NO comprehension about downloading and other technical whoop-de-doo will understand.

And aside from the need to find a new reader so that I can do searches, there was something else happening / changing  (when?) having to do with blogs that are not Blogger blogs.  Will they all be gone from my Dashboard at some point?  How do I prevent that?  (I have some that I don't want to lose track of.)  And what the heck is Google + and do I want it?  Why? What will it do differently than what I've been doing these past three years?  HELP!  I'm feeling very dumb right now, and I will very much appreciate your help.  I'm feeling a bit alone here in my technophobia.

Here's the update: 
So, friends,  I now am signed on to Bloglovin', but am already a little flummoxed.  The Google reader had a search option, where you searched through the blogs you follow for a specific word/topic - for example "Chihuly" or  "color wheel" etc.  Then you could highlight them and get back to them easily.  Bloglovin' has a nice clean format, but as far as I can see, the search option on Bloglovin' searches every damn blog it can find (not just what I follow), thus making it impossible to find that post you are looking for.  I couldn't figure out how to search as I did on Google reader.  Any advice?  Do I need to try Feedly instead?  And what does it mean to 'claim' your blog?  Why would I want to/need to do that?