Google’s New Bookmarking Interface, Formerly Called “Stars,” Goes Live In Chrome Beta

Last month, Google quietly launched its new bookmarking service previously called Stars on the Chrome Web store as a free download. Today, the company says it’s integrating the feature into the Google Chrome browser. Starting immediately, a Chrome Beta browser update will introduce the new look-and-feel for bookmarks, which are now displayed in a more visible fashion, include a more powerful search feature, and are automatically tagged to help users keep their bookmarks organized.

During the Web 2.0 era, social bookmarking services like Delicious overshadowed the usefulness of keeping bookmarks stored in the browser, but the feature itself is still used regularly used today. In fact, it perhaps even grew in popularity with the rise of mobile. By keeping a set of bookmarks in a browser like Chrome, you could sync that selection of favorited sites to any other device you use, like your phone or tablet.

Google’s overhaul of its bookmarking feature was first leaked back in May when a developer found a copy of an extension called “Google Stars.” Google later rolled this out to the public on the Chrome Web Store for further testing, but made no formal announcement.

googlestars

With the updated interface, users can star their favorite sites, share folders of bookmarks with friends or colleagues, and can organize their bookmarks into various folders. But what’s handy now in the new release is that Google Chrome can analyze your bookmarks for you, and place them into the appropriate automatically generated categories. That eliminates much of the manual organization that comes with using bookmarks and, with bookmarks’ built-in search, it makes finding your favorite and most useful sites easier to find.

There’s no word yet on when Google will transition the feature out of the beta build to the public, stable version of the browser. But the company says it will be rolling out this feature gradually over the next few weeks, beginning now.