Google has quietly launched a nascent bookmarking and tagging product as a feature to search history.
It’s not “social” bookmarking, like del.icio.us, because bookmarks are not public and cannot be shared among users. The product also requires way too many steps to create a bookmark.
To bookmark a site, make sure your google search history is turned on. Click “search history” on the top right of the results page. Bookmark a site by clicking on the star next to a result, and fill out the metadata.
There are some nice ajax features, including auto-fill for tags. Tags are space delineated and I noticed that the “,” key doesn’t work at all in the field – reducing tagging errors common to other applications.
To see tagged sites, click on the bookmarks link on the left sidebar. Bookmarks also appear on your personalized Google homepage.
Bookmarks are not public yet. If/once they are, this may be the first serious competition to del.icio.us (note that Yahoo’s product has had less than steller growth). Perhaps the portals should just acknowledge del.icio.us’ commanding network effect and (try to) acquire them?
I tried the personalized search for about a month but found I didn’t really end up going back to it for anything.
I ended up disabling it since I found it a bit creepy that Google would have access to your lifetime search history.
My first reaction, which lately has been a common one concerning Google, is WTF? Is this how Googlers spend their 20% free time – copying other people’s (better) ideas? What happened to “Don’t be evil”?
Google has been releasing a lot of products in Beta a bit too early, IMO. There are a lot of features that need to be added… I’m sure they will eventually…
Jon, I’ve found the personalized search to be great, I go back to it all the time to find sites I reached a day or two ago and didn’t bookmark on my browser. I don’t know how much I’ll use their current bookmarking system, probably much more so once they integrate it with the Google toolbar so I can just click one button while on that page and it’s bookmarked at Google.
And I don’t think it’s evil to copy others’ ideas as long as you add on to the value. Competition is a good thing!
Um, I suggested this to Google a week and a half ago. Why is my name not in lights on the Google homepage, hm?
I hope that once it’s out of beta, that they move it to the main search screen. I dislike having to dig for a tool. I know I don’t have to dig that deep, but I’ll probably never use it if it’s limited to my personalized search history.
I also agree that this is a good move. It only makes sense that this type of service becomes integrated with a search engine. There are many, many services out there right now, the best of which will be emulated or scooped up by the big players, in order to offer an end-to-end solution which I think your average user requires.
Man that inside google site is sure did take the long way to say something simple.
All they had to say was “Go to http://www.goog...m/searchhistory and search.”
The whole idea behind using a star to create a bookmark was not exactly intuitive. Is it me or is Google just obsessed with stars and labels? Still, that does provide for uniformity across their (sometimes daily) growing number of tools and services.
While I’m not impressed with what Google is doing here I do think their efforts indicate a fundamental shift in the way we view search. Others like wink call it ‘people powered search’, BlinkList calls it their ‘personal discovery engine’, and Yahoo! dubs it My Web 2.0. Tagging will transform our approach to finding information on the web efficiently. Search 2.0 is coming.
sure, except you can’t bookmark sites directly, you bookmark search results. And it’s not social or shared, other than that it’s just like delicious.
While it’s not that bad, it’s kind of counter-intuitive … del.icio.us works because you bookmark the page once you’ve decided your interested, while you’re still looking at it.
Google will need to come up with an add-on for the toolbar if this is going to work. It’s just too tedious to have to go back to your search history if you decide you want to bookmark a page.
It is stated …Tags are space delineated and I noticed that the “,†key doesn’t work at all in the field – reducing tagging errors common to other applications…
Right now… I need to use comma to delimit tags as in “abc def” becomes 1 tag and only “ghi,jkl” becomes 2 tags…
Is it just me, or is this a way for them to improve their increasingly dismal search results: “Let’s have everyone rate the best sites.” I don’t know about everyone else, but I can rarely find what I’m looking for on Google anymore.
Search and bookmarking go together very well without a doubt.
I don’t think this is the way to go after del.icio.us. I have 2 Google accounts (since I have 2 gnail accounts) and my search is all over the accounts. So this kind of service will definitely not help me since my bookmarks and tags are all over and there are too many clicks involved forit to be a really effective competitor to del.icio.us
It would be cool if they solve this problem so I can consolidate my search and bookmarking in one place.
I also found this to be a very interesting development. Tags are incredibly valuable to search engines, so the real question here might well be, who benefits from your tagging? How will Google increase the value proposition to achieve the critical mass they need? I expect they plan to do more with this.
I’ve written more here: http://hybernau.../google-tagging
Nice idea but you can’t add bookmarks unless its been in your history.
There is now a bookmarklet to make the task of making a bookmark much easier. However, I wish they allowed be to add multiple tags to a bookmark like del.icio.us.
I’m playing with it… you can put multiple tags.
What I think is the best though… is the new toolbar that includes the bookmarks in a drop down structure.
Unfortunately that version is only for IE… the firefox one doesn’t pick it up yet.
I just started using these and I like it so far. Do you guys know if these are still private? If I mark with notes to myself that I don’t want people to see, are they private? I don’t want my notes showing up on some del.icio.us-like site. Thanks.